MALAGA.- Joana Vasconcelos. Transfiguration at the Museo Picasso Málaga presents an extensive overview of the artist’s career through a selection of 13 sculptures and installations that allow visitors to experience how the artis shifts the meaning of objects without erasing their memory. The exhibition's title precisely defines this process: the textile that becomes architecture, ornaments assuming a structural role, the everyday object functioning as a critical device, the house that opens up as a public stage, and the museum transforming into a space of experience rather than mere conservation. This concept spreads across the exhibition rooms, where the daily life attains a monumental dimension, the utilitarian acquires a ceremonial character, and the domestic expands into the architectural.

The act of “transfiguring” does not imply replacing or erasing the origin: it remains what it is but begins to reveal itself in a different way. Objects maintain their material identity and cultural significance, but their meaning is transformed by placing them in a new perceptual framework. Joana Vasconcelos exemplifies this in the following words: " If we look at Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, they are there, but at the same time, they are not there. They have been transfigured through geometric forms, which are not natural; their identity has mutated."

A UNIQUE BODY OF WORK

Joana Vasconcelos (Paris, 1971) is a Portuguese artist whose work draws on the material culture of her country. Using everyday objects, folk symbols, industrial materials, and artisanal techniques passed down through generations, her work explores art's capacity to transform the familiar into visual and spatial experiences that alter our perception of the world. In recent decades, Vasconcelos has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary European art through a sculptural and installation practice that reinterprets material culture, folk traditions, and everyday objects with a critical insight and sensory richness.

Vasconcelos’s work offers an aesthetic experience that combines visual seduction and reflection, inviting the viewer to question familiar assumptions and revealing how art can transform the way we perceive the world. For Miguel López-Remiro, the exhibition's curator, considers “the artist's work as a series of operations that reorganise our cultural hierarchies: from the domestic to the public, the artisanal to the industrial, and the popular to the monumental.” Vasconcelos has said that contemporary art generates spaces for interpretation that can be “physical, mental, conceptual or spiritual.”

The starting point for the artist are recognisable elements—household utensils, industrial materials, cultural symbols and fragments from folk tradition—which are subjected to transformative processes that modify their scale, function and relationship to space. Through these operations the everyday can acquire a monumental dimension; the utilitarian becomes ceremonial while the ornamental comes to occupy a central place in artistic experience. These shifts, however, do not erase the memory of the objects: the viewer recognises their origin, although we can no longer connect with them in the same way. It is in this tension that the experience of transfiguration is activated. To reach this point, scale functions as a consequence, not as a result. Vasconcelos’s aim is not to offer definitive answers: “I want to ask questions”, she repeatedly states. For her, “art, when it is not conceptual, does not need translation; it needs interpretation and feeling, it needs emotion. When you work with people's emotions, it is more interesting: with my work, I am not looking to provide answers, I want to ask questions.”

TRADITION AND DOMESTIC WISDOM

One of the most distinctive aspects of Vasconcelos's work is the use of artisanal techniques historically linked to the domestic sphere, such as crochet, embroidery and textile work. These practices, passed down through generations and often sidelined within the official narrative of art history, become the starting point for large-scale sculptures and installations. The artist’s work is thus created in a territory where tradition, craftsmanship, popular culture and technology are continuously intertwined.

For Joana Vasconcelos, craft represents a body of techniques, materials, and knowledge passed down through generations. Within this context, her exploration of the feminine, understood as a way of thinking and structuring artistic practice, takes on particular significance. This dimension is evident in her Lisbon studio, a space with a “home-like feel”, with more than fifty people working in a structure characterised by its horizontal, collaborative and self-aware governance model. The artist has expressed her profound gratitude for living at this moment in history: “Finally, women today can take their place in world history, they can have a voice and speak from their difference. Women, many women, even women in my family, couldn't have a voice, couldn't study art, couldn't be the artists they wanted to be.”

PICASSO AND THE EXPERIENCE OF TRANSFIGURATION

Vasconcelos recalls the impact of seeing Guernica for the first time as a teenager. At seventeen years old, standing in front of the canvas, she understood that war could be experienced not as a narrative or historical representation but as a physical and emotional experience. “Looking at the painting, I could feel war”, she recalls. That experience revealed to her that transfiguration does not eliminate emotion but rather intensifies it: the image is altered but the feeling remains and is in a way is amplified.

This logic takes on particular resonance in the context of the exhibition at the Museo Picasso Málaga. Rather than establishing an explicit dialogue with Picasso's work, the exhibition resonates with a tradition in which the everyday, the popular and the vernacular become active material for artistic experimentation. Within this context, the notion of transfiguration finds an inevitable echo in the work of Pablo Picasso.

For Picasso, the vernacular functioned as a space of freedom, in which past and present coexist without hierarchies. For Vasconcelos, tradition emerges as a living material, understood not as a source of nostalgia but as a site of transformation, open to displacement, fragmentation, and reconfiguration. In both cases, transfiguration does not imply a radical break with the original context, nor an extreme act of estrangement; rather, it is a more subtle process that absorbs diverse languages and alters them without erasing their memory. The popular and the domestic do not appear as a starting point to be returned to but as a space for action. Objects are no longer understood solely through their function, but through their potential to be rearranged and generate new meanings. Their origin remains recognisable but their status changes: the form is maintained while the meaning expands.

In this context, presenting the artist’s work at the Museo Picasso Málaga takes on a unique, almost intimate significance. Exhibiting at the museum comes close to the experience of entering Picasso’s own home: “When you enter a space like this museum, a place that belongs to Picasso, whether you intend to or not, you enter into a relationship with Picasso’s energy, his homeland, his identity, and his native Málaga.”

Therefore the exhibition not only traces a journey through the work of Joana Vasconcelos but also creates a space of resonance in which different ways of understanding artistic transformation converge. Transfiguration ceases to be solely a concept and becomes a shared experience: a way of seeing that displaces the familiar and opens up new possibilities for meaning.