Born in 1971, Joana Vasconcelos is a visual artist renowned for her monumental sculptures, whose 25 years practise stretches to drawing and film.
Vasconcelos creates large-scale installations, often with performance components, which encourage viewers to walk through and touch them. She is also known for enveloping everyday objects—pianos, laptops, commercially produced decorative objects—in crocheted or knitted material. Through such works, she contrasts mass-produced and handcrafted and alludes to our values and associations with each.
Much of Vasconcelos’s work also confronts feminist concerns and societal conventions, paralleled by her use of techniques typically categorized as craft and associated with women, such as crochet and sewing.
International acclaim came at the first Venice Biennale ever curated by women with The Bride in 2005, followed by Trafaria Praia, the first floating pavilion in the biennale representing Portugal in 2013. The youngest artist and the only woman ever at Palace of Versailles, to a record breaking 1.6 million visitors, her 2012 exhibition was the most visited in France in 50 years. In 2018, Vasconcelos became the first Por
tuguese to exhibit at Guggenheim Bilbao with a major retrospective, which was one of the most visited in the museum’s history and reached 4th place in The Art Newspaper’s annual exhibitions’ Top 10.
2022 finds her preparing, among other pieces, a Tree of Life for Vincennes Castle’s Chapel (in Paris, France) and her most ambitious project to date: the Wedding Cake for Lord Jacob Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor (in England).
More details in the official website Joana Vasconcelos.
