A leading Portuguese artist based in Lisbon, Joana Vasconcelos works across multiple mediums, including sculpture, installations, video, photography, and vibrant fabric patchwork. She gained international recognition at the 2005 Venice Biennale with her provocative piece The Bride—a grand, elegant chandelier crafted from 25,000 white tampons, meticulously removed from their packaging.
Vasconcelos’ works incorporate everyday objects such as pots, pans, mirrors, and telephones, which she recontextualizes with irony and humor, subverting their original meaning. By challenging their status, she bridges the domestic sphere with the public space, addressing themes of femininity, feminism, and consumer culture. Her practice employs a diverse range of materials, including textiles, plastic, and ceramics, blending artisanal craftsmanship with industrial fabrics. Through intricate crochet work and patchwork of varied textures, she stitches together monumental, vibrant compositions that defy convention.
In Solitaire, Vasconcelos presented a colossal diamond ring crafted from gilded car wheel rims, with the “diamond” composed of crystal whiskey glasses. In Finisterra, she created an intricate crochet piece from colorful wool, set against a framed golden canvas.
Vasconcelos has exhibited extensively worldwide and made history in 2012 as the first woman and the youngest artist to showcase her work at the Palace of Versailles. She represented Portugal at the 2013 Venice Biennale, the same year she unveiled Lusitana, a grandiose installation at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art—an immense, multicolored fabric structure that floated across four stories of the museum’s new wing. To date, she has participated in over 240 exhibitions, with a career-defining highlight being her 2018 solo exhibition I’m Your Mirror at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Bottom line: Bridging the domestic sphere with the public space.
