A Palace Ignites with Contemporary Splendor
Step into Madrid’s Liria Palace this spring and you’ll find history wearing a new skin. Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, master of the monumental and mischievous, has taken over the Duke of Alba’s residence with her exhibition Flamboyant (14 February – 31 July 2025). The halls once guarded by Velázquez, Goya, and Titian now resonate with chandelier hearts, crocheted wolves, and a teapot fit for queens.
This is not Versailles redux or Florence revisited. It is bolder: the first time Vasconcelos has invaded a palace still inhabited, turning lived-in rooms into sites of spectacle.
The Art of Excess Meets Aristocratic Lineage
Vasconcelos has always wielded scale like a weapon. From her floating pavilion at the Venice Biennale to her Guinness-breaking crowds in Versailles, she has proven that size and subversion can be allies. But here, amid the Alba collection, her audacity reads differently.
In the Goya Room, her wooden sculpture Wig (Perruque)—ponytails bursting out like rebellious fountains—converses with the White Duchess herself. Goya painted the Duchess with her hair defiantly loose; Vasconcelos responds with a sculpture that lets hair become architecture. It is not parody but kinship across centuries.
Elsewhere, a giant rotating heart of black plastic spoons (Corazon Independiente) beats against the solemnity of Velázquez and Zurbarán’s portraits. Amália Rodrigues’s fado haunts the air, insisting that even aristocratic walls cannot resist longing.
A Dialogue in Scale, Material, and Myth
Unlike the sterile hush of museums, the Liria Palace is alive—family photos on tables, the smell of use clinging to velvet curtains. Vasconcelos treats this intimacy not as obstacle but as collaborator. She floods the chapel with a sprawling red Flaming Heart, its tendrils writhing like tentacles, while Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah dissolves the boundary between devotion and spectacle.
In the gardens, a colossal wrought-iron teapot (La Théière) honors Catherine of Braganza, Portugal’s queen who popularized tea in England. It is both absurd and perfect—a reminder that domestic ritual, when enlarged, becomes myth.
Two new wolves, Only Goya and Velázquez, clad in pastel crochet, stand sentinel by family portraits. They are guardians, jesters, and metaphors: history softened by yarn, fierceness recast as ornament.
From Venice to Madrid: A Career of Firsts
For Vasconcelos, Flamboyant is both continuation and milestone. Since her breakthrough at the 2005 Venice Biennale with The Bride, she has rewritten the script for women artists on the global stage. She was the youngest and first female artist to conquer Versailles, the first Portuguese artist at the Guggenheim Bilbao, and in 2023, she brought her work into Florence’s Uffizi and Pitti Palace alongside Leonardo and Caravaggio.
Her art thrives on contradiction: everyday objects transfigured into grandeur, irony threaded with reverence, popular culture woven into high tradition. Crochet, spoons, earrings—things relegated to the domestic sphere—become her weapons of critique, aimed at consumer society, gender roles, and the mythologies we inherit.
Why Liria Palace Matters Now
The House of Alba Foundation’s 50th anniversary could have been marked with reverence for the past. Instead, it chose risk, giving Vasconcelos carte blanche. By integrating forty works—including new commissions—into previously unseen corners like the chapel and music room, the palace becomes less a mausoleum than a stage.
The Liria Palace is not a repository of history, but a living space that adjusts to contemporary contexts while preserving its essence.
– As Vasconcelos herself put it.
In her hands, history is not embalmed—it is provoked, teased, made to sing again.
Editor’s Choice
With Flamboyant, Joana Vasconcelos continues to remind us that contemporary art’s true power lies not in shock, but in dialogue with what we thought was untouchable. She does not dethrone Goya or Velázquez—she dances with them, her plastic spoons and yarn wolves threading through centuries of Spanish grandeur.
The result is neither parody nor reverence but something rarer: a vision of art as living organism, forever flamboyant, forever in flux.