‘I work at a level of detail that resonates with the fashion world’ … Venus – Valentino Garavani Through the Eyes of Joana Vasconcelos. Photograph: Bruno Lopes/Courtesy EDP Foundation/ MAAT View image in fullscreen ‘I work at a level of detail that resonates with the fashion world’ … Venus – Valentino Garavani Through the Eyes of Joana Vasconcelos. Photograph: Bruno Lopes/Courtesy EDP Foundation/ MAAT Art and design ‘Enough of this suffering!’ Joana Vasconcelos on why she is fed up with women’s art defined by pain The Portuguese artist is famous for her monumental ceramic wedding cakes and gigantic chandeliers made of tampons. So why is a new show in Lisbon pairing her with Valentino’s size-zero catwalk dresses?
Dale Berning Sawa Mon 12 Oct 2026 01.07 CEST Last modified on Mon 12 Oct 2026 01.09 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T o interview the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos is to jump on to a moving train. She is telling me why she uses needlework to make huge things: 15-metre doilies, say, or a tree 13.5 metres tall rustling with 150,000 hand-sewn leaves. “One day, I said to myself,” she says, “why not bring domestic detail into monumental sculpture? What do we know of works like this? OK, there’s Louise Bourgeois. But it wasn’t enormous. She worked in detail but on small things. There’s the beauty of Niki de Saint Phalle. But it’s always papier mache – a technique that’s very simple, very practical, but not chic.”
It takes a certain something to compare yourself to these two French giantesses of art. It takes something else to castigate Bourgeois and de Saint Phalle for not being big, bold and beautiful enough. But if there’s one female contemporary artist who can do it without coming across as delusional, it’s Vasconcelos. Born in Paris in 1971 into an artistic Portuguese family, Vasconcelos has established herself as one of her country’s leading contemporary artists – and one of the world’s most ambitious.
View image in fullscreen ‘Why not bring domestic detail into monumental sculpture’ … Joana Vasconcelos on her larger-than-life artwork. Photograph: Kenton Thatcher In dimension and scale, her work recalls male monumentalists like Jeff Koons, Christo or Takashi Murakami. Representing Portugal at the 2005 Venice Biennale, she showed, among other works, The Bride, a six-metre-tall chandelier made of 14,000 tampons. On Valentine’s Day 2019, the city of Paris installed her Coeur de Paris at the Porte de Clignancourt: a giant revolving heart on a pole nine metres tall, tiled red and blinking with thousands of LEDs. Elsewhere, she’s made a 12-metre high ceramic wedding cake with a built-in water feature (currently on view at Waddesdon Manor in Aylesbury), an eight-metre tall engagement ring of 110 golden car rims and 1,450 crystal whisky glasses (recently installed in Atlético FC’s home stadium), and three-metre tall stilettos, of stainless steel pots, called Marilyn.
“I work on the macro with the micro,” she says. Her greatest strength, says João Pinharanda, the director of Lisbon’s Museum of Art , Architecture and Technology (MAAT), is the way her work speaks “very simply” but also “very loudly”.
I have come to MAAT because Vasconcelos is installing Venus, a two-person exhibition that puts her creations in dialogue with Italian fashion legend Valentino, as part of the museum’s 10th anniversary celebrations. Each of her works on show is absolutely OTT: riotous in colour, quite preposterously decorative, the size not o…