ROME — If, when entering the latest Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti exhibition, you are thrown a bit off balance, that’s exactly the point.
“Ewa Juszkiewicz’s paintings invite us to move beyond what is familiar and discover new perspectives,” said Giammetti during a preview interview at PM23, the foundation’s cultural venue in Rome, of the Polish artist. Inspired by classic 18th- and 19th-century paintings, 26 of her surrealist female portraits are displayed next to 38 dresses selected from the Maison Valentino archives.
Reinterpreting the masterpieces, Juszkiewicz transforms her sitters’ faces into configurations of hair, turbans, flowers, shells and other organic forms, disrupting established conventions and opening the image to new interpretations. Her work is thought-provoking, “it triggers questions, you look at the classics and all that is known, and suddenly you are caught off guard because everything is overturned,” said Giammetti.
The exhibition, the third at PM23 and titled “Aura,” explores “the ability of fashion and art to transform the way we look at beauty, through materials, color, form and metamorphosis,” explained Giammetti. “This vision has always accompanied my journey with Valentino and continues to guide the work of our foundation today: a belief in beauty as a force capable of generating culture, imagination and change.”
Asked about the reason for concealing the women’s physiognomy and if this has ever created controversy, Juszkiewicz said she does “not think of it simply as covering the face, but as transforming the portrait. By replacing the facial features with fabric, hair, flowers or plants, I question conventional and idealized representations of women and open the image to new meanings.”
She acknowledged that the portraits “sometimes provoke strong reactions: some people find them beautiful, while others find them unsettling, but I would not describe this as controversy. This tension is an important part of the work.”
Indeed, Giammetti believes Juszkiewicz is aiming “to render beauty mysterious, you know there is a woman there because you see a lock of hair from behind the flowers, for example, and you feel you are discovering her.”
Giammetti, who owns two of her works, finds her style “striking,” so much so that her paintings “stand out in their difference against any other artist and that’s what I like, and what Valentino liked as well.”
A point of contact with Giammetti is the artist’s strong interest in elegance and fashion, he said, pointing to the finely detailed dresses in the paintings.
Seeing the final layout of the exhibition, Juszkiewicz remarked on “how many connections appeared between two very different practices. The shared use of color, fabric, volume, ornament and historical references creates a visually rich dialogue between the paintings and the gowns.”
Valentino “expressed his fashion not in a cerebral way, but in a direct manner, and I like the idea of placing his gowns next to someone who asks questions,” continued Giammetti. “The fact that these two worlds are not close opens up to reflection and new paths, forging the future of the Foundation, so that it is not necessarily a celebration of fashion.”
That may well be, but the gowns on display can easily be considered pure works of art. Cue the stunning spring 1988 couture evening gown with a draped black georgette bodice and black satin skirt. This is adorned with two oval inlaid embroidery inserts accented with rhinestones and set off by a yellow lining, depicting the encounter between a woman seated in profile and a small Cupid. The style was displayed next to a 2020 oil on canvas painting by Juszkiewicz inspired by Jan Adam Kruseman.
One of Giammetti’s favorite Valentino designs is a spring 1996 couture evening dress in sage green, sand and taupe-gray chiffon, featuring a one-shoulder neckline with a dense draping across the elongated bodice before flowing freely down the length of the skirt. Valentino would create the draping himself by hand, one pleat at a time, Giammetti recalled.
This was placed in a room where three Juszkiewicz works hinged on flourishing gladioli and calla, next to Valentino’s gowns that expressed his couture skills with sequined and embroidered dresses embellished with floral references and leaf motifs.
In another room, a fall 1990 couture chiffon evening dress featured a bodice embroidered with large, multicolored sequin scales and black beads in a mosaic pattern, a polychromatic motif echoed in a basket-weave design also seen in the panels of the iridescent chiffon skirt.
Especially for “Aura,” Juszkiewicz created a new painting titled “A Portrait in Valentino Red,” presented at PM23 for the first time, which takes as its point of departure an arresting sculptural gown from the designer’s fall 2007 couture collection in his signature red hue.
Juszkiewicz said she “chose a gown in Valentino’s emblematic red, whose sculptural presence and visual power immediately captured my imagination. I am particularly drawn to Valentino’s vision of femininity, which moves between delicacy and strength, with the woman at its center retaining a powerful, self-assured presence.”
Giammetti said he was surprised by Juszkiewicz’s “kind of shyness in touching the dress; it was a real homage to Valentino.”
The artist confessed being “very excited by Giammetti’s proposal. From the beginning, I felt it could become a very interesting dialogue, and I was curious to explore the connections between my paintings and Valentino’s work. This experience showed me how a dialogue between two different disciplines can reveal new connections. Seeing the extraordinary craftsmanship in Valentino’s use of fabric, and the way he treated it almost like sculpture, was very inspiring to me. It makes me want to explore these ideas further in my own work.”
Juszkiewicz said there is no precise connection between the artists whose works she reinterprets. “The common thread is not a particular group of artists, but the way women were represented within European portraiture. I am drawn to images that are visually fascinating but also carry strong conventions around femininity, beauty and social status. I use them as a starting point to create my own story from a contemporary perspective.”
The exhibition will be open to the public from Sunday to Feb. 21.
PM23, located on Piazza Mignanelli, next to the storied Valentino headquarters, was unveiled in May last year with the first exhibition “Orizzonti/Rosso [Horizons/Red]” hinging on the color closely associated with the couturier’s designs over five decades, next to 30 art masterpieces by the likes of Lucio Fontana, Gerhard Richter, Alberto Burri, Mark Rothko and Pablo Picasso, to name a few. The second exhibition, that ran from January to May, was “Venus — Valentino Garavani through the eyes of Joana Vasconcelos” as the Portuguese artist reinterpreted the couturier’s creative universe.
Giammetti was pleased with the performance of PM23 so far.
“It would have been easier to just open a Valentino museum, but this is more interesting, creating a link with artists, a place to discover, and it has become a reference point for Roman culture.”