Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos has placed Valentino Garavani’s haute couture alongside her own sculptures in a new exhibition at MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon. VENUS – Valentino Garavani through the eyes of Joana Vasconcelos is open until 22 February. The exhibition sets the designer’s gowns in conversation with her work, and asks what luxury clothing means when it is placed next to the objects of everyday domestic life.
The show is a collaboration with the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation, named after the Italian designer and his long-time personal and business partner. It first opened at PM23, the foundation’s cultural space in Rome, where it ran until 19 July 2026. The Lisbon version is part of MAAT’s tenth-anniversary celebrations and opens alongside three other new exhibitions at the museum.
Vasconcelos went through the Valentino archive to choose the garments. She deliberately avoided most of the shades of Valentino Red, the colour most closely tied to the house and associated with power, passion and sensuality, keeping only one emblematic example. At the centre of the exhibition stands her textile sculpture Valkyrie Venus, which takes its colours and textures from the dresses she selected. “It was from this idea of luxury that Valkyrie Venus emerged,” she said.
The route through the museum plays on the distance between housework and high fashion, and between a woman’s private and public identities. In a room Vasconcelos calls the Ironing Room, gowns that cannot be ironed stand on either side of a composition built around a household iron. Elsewhere, feather dusters, pots and cutlery are set near couture pieces. The artist describes the contrast as one between the woman at home and the woman who becomes a goddess when she puts on a Valentino dress.
Vasconcelos said that putting the show together was not a struggle, and described the process as dynamic and enjoyable. For visitors, the exhibition offers a view of Valentino’s work that sits somewhere between a fashion archive and a contemporary art installation, with the dresses treated as material for her sculpture as much as objects on display. Those who missed the Rome presentation can see the Lisbon version at MAAT, among the museum’s anniversary programme, until it closes on 22 February.
