What does one do after 38 years on the helm of a wildly profitable namesake model? Exit and purchase a Fifteenth-century palazzo in Venice with one’s associate. In 2024, after stepping away from vogue, Dries Van Noten did simply that, signing paperwork in Italy alongside Patrick Vangheluwe. The result’s Palazzo Pisani Moretta, as soon as residence to a few of Venice’s strongest households, now repurposed as Dries Van Noten’s Fondazione, at present staging its debut exhibition, “The Solely True Protest Is Magnificence”. On view till October 4, for anybody occupied with seeing what resistance seems like with ceiling frescoes.
Geert Bruloot had fairly a yr himself. He began 2026 by curating the primary main retrospective of The Antwerp Six (Dries Van Noten included). Now, he finds himself co-curating a completely totally different scale of ambition alongside Van Noten within the Mediterranean. It takes a couple of particular person to place collectively a mini biennale of over 200 works, drawn from almost 50 artists. The present unfolds in loosely outlined chapters, mild and darkness, abstraction and transformation, nature, materiality, the physique. There, a romantic Christian Lacroix robe sits beside a Comme des Garçons silhouette, which in flip sits beside Joseph Arzoumanov’s chess set, the place an AI-programmed robotic arm strikes the items. A Steven Shearer canvas seems close by, a Casa Codognato ring catches the sunshine someplace alongside the best way, and a Kaori Kurihara ceramic occupies its personal little nook.
Every thing right here comes from the hand. Even probably the most curated model of magnificence doesn’t escape that truth. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a Nineteen Sixties Phil Ochs line written through the Vietnam Battle: “in such ugly instances, the one true protest is magnificence.” In a setting the place magnificence has by no means precisely been briefly provide, the place does every of us flip to search out it?
