The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos was born in Paris in 1971. As an artist Vasconcelos is interested in reviving the surrealistic ready-made, mixing it with a certain sense of Noveau Réalisme and Pop, she often starts out from ingenious operations of displacement. This can be seen in her site-specific art shows which are artistic interventions over pre-existent areas. Joana Vasconcelos places her works in dialog and confrontation with different spaces, decorations, themes, and histories. In her art, Vasconcelos appropriates, decontextualizes, and subverts pre-existent objects and everyday realities to challenge the prearranged routines of daily life. Her work engages in an investigation of gender, class, and national identities through the media of sculpture, installations, assemblages, video, and photography. This way of conceiving art becomes particularly clear in her show in the gardens and the inside of the chateau of Versailles in 2012 and in her project for the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), which determined the affirmation of her career within the international art circuit.

Joana Vasconcelos

Evoking the 1960s Nouveau Réalisme movement, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and the symbolic, tactile constructions of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, Joana Vasconcelos threads everyday objects and materials together in her assemblages, which comment on womanhood, nationality, and consumerism.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Joana_Vasconcelos_Crocheted_Creatures_Content_sheet_2024_New_branding_PDF_compressed.pdf

With the use of crochet and the compartmentalisation of forms, Vasconcelos reiterates the concept that&nbsp;individuals frequently behave and exist separately from their conscience, showing a lack of sufficient scrutiny of their perceptions. The paradox of lace is highlighted, as it served as a means for Portuguese women to address the&nbsp;emptiness in their lives, representing the sole form of expression in response to an entirely&nbsp;passive social situation.“Lace decorates and protects, but protection is another manifestation of imprisonment. It’s for the spectator to decide what the crochet means for him, whether it’s&nbsp;showpiece or&nbsp;dungeon.”—Joana Vasconcelos, in an interview published in Joana Vasconcelos: Versailles (LeYa, 2012)These new artworks are based on the artist’s sculptural ceramics placed on a rich, Baroque style background.

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“ I don’t believe in telling people what they should see and I am always amazed by what they project onto my artworks, which is always connected with their own life experience. „

—Joana Vasconcelos