Querida Vasconcelos, te admiro. (Dear Vasconcelos, I admire you)
Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese artist. She was born in Paris in 1971 and now lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.
Much of Vasconcelos’ work deals with feminism, as well as social and political issues. Vasconcelos appropriates, decontextualises and subverts pre-existent objects and everyday realities into sculptures, installations, performances, and video or photographic records, to reveal an acute sense of scale and mastery of color, while combining in the materialization of concepts that challenge the prearranged routines of daily life. Vasconcelos’ operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the Ready-made, Nouveau Réalismeand Pop, provide a vision that is complicit and critical of contemporary society and the notions of collective identity, especially those related to the status of women, class distinction or national identity. This process originates a discourse around contemporary idiosyncrasies, where the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate contemporaneity’s usual fluxes of signification.[2]
In June 2011, the installation “Contaminação” opened the group exhibition The World Belongs to You, held at Palazzo Grassi. In 2012, Vasconcelos showed her work at the major annual contemporary art exhibition in the Palace of Versailles, thus continuing the contemporary art programme initiated in 2008. Following in the footsteps of American artist Jeff Koons, the French Xavier Veilhan and Bernar Venet, and the Japanese Takashi Murakami, Joana Vasconcelos was the first woman and the youngest contemporary artist to exhibit in Versailles.[3]
The work exhibited in Versailles was not appreciated by all in Versailles. Vasconcelos’ goal for the portions of the show in the Galerie des Glaces was to have her pieces, A Noivaand Carmen, were to be displayed on opposite ends of the hall, but according to what Vasconcelos was told, “…they are sexual works not appropriate at Versailles.” [4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joana_Vasconcelos
