The first exhibition at the Fondazione Dries Van Noten is a mysterious cabinet of curiosities

Beauty as the most radical statement of our time: former fashion designer Dries Van Noten transforms a palazzo on the Grand Canal into a total work of art.

Between the heavy velvet curtains of Palazzo Pisani Moretta lingers that peculiar scent of aged wood, Grand Canal humidity and wax that only Venice knows. Outside, a vaporetto glides past; inside, a dress by Comme des Garçons hangs like a dark silhouette beneath an 18th-century ceiling fresco. A few rooms away, glass flowers by Lilla Tabasso sparkle from the earth as if they had secretly pushed their way through the marble floor. And somewhere between gilded stucco ceilings, skull-shaped jewels and futuristic ceramics, it suddenly becomes clear: Dries Van Noten has not opened an exhibition venue in Venice. He has created a world of his own – dazzlingly radiant and yet bathed in half-shadow. 

With the new Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Venice’s Palazzo Pisani Moretta, a second career begins for the Belgian designer. After leaving his fashion house in 2024, one might have expected Van Noten to devote himself to gardening – one of his great passions. Instead, together with his partner Patrick Vangheluwe, he purchased one of the most spectacular palazzi on the Grand Canal. The inaugural exhibition bears the title The Only True Protest Is Beauty, a phrase by the American songwriter and activist Phil Ochs. Beauty, then, as resistance. Not as escapism, but as a way of being. 

Simply walking through the building feels like stepping into one of Van Noten’s former runway shows: slow, atmospheric and hypnotic. You do not merely climb staircases; you move through a carefully composed system of emotions. In one room, brutalist metal works stand beside Venetian chandeliers; in the next, fashion designer Christian Lacroix and Japanese ceramic art meet like old acquaintances at a masked ball. Van Noten himself describes the exhibition not as a conventional art show, but as a dialogue between disciplines. ​“The boundaries that once existed are gone,” he said in an interview with AnOther Magazine about the divide between art and craft. What matters today, he believes, is what is still created ​“with hand, heart and brain.” That sentence essentially explains the entire palazzo. This is not about status art, nor about the familiar Biennale gestures that oscillate between theory and grandiosity and can be found throughout the city this summer and autumn. It is about materiality. About hands. About surfaces. About the slow process of making things. Van Noten has assembled more than 200 works spanning fashion, jewellery, glass, ceramics, design and photography. 

The exhibition is at its most powerful where it refuses to treat beauty as something polished and perfect. There are Lilla Tabasso’s floral glass works, simultaneously magnificent and already fading. There are the morbid jewels of the Venetian house Codognato with their vanitas motifs. Monumental photographs by Steven Shearer appear – sleeping boys, distant and vulnerable. Then come the grotesquely beautiful ceramics of Japanese artist Kaori Kurihara, as though born from a fever dream. What truly matters, however, is the way all these works converse with one another. Nothing feels sealed off in a museum-like manner. The exhibition functions more like a cabinet of curiosities for adults – full of friction, abundance and unexpected encounters. That is precisely what makes it so Venetian. Decadence and decay reveal themselves simultaneously. 

The palazzo itself, remodelled in the Rococo style in 1740, plays the leading role. Its gilded stucco work, frescoes, dark mirrors and heavy doors are not merely a backdrop – they are active participants. The artworks respond to the rooms, sometimes almost aggressively. A raw metal sculpture by Peter Buggenhout stands in the entrance hall like an alien object from a dystopian future. A few rooms above, a delicate glass table appears almost ghostly in its lightness. It is precisely this tension that fascinates Van Noten. Beauty as something restless. Not an answer, but a question. Together with Patrick Vangheluwe, he expressed it this way: ​“Not an escape from reality, but a way of facing it.” 

One might say this is the anti-Instagram version of beauty. Nothing here works through quick effects. Even the most spectacular rooms demand slowness. You look more closely. You pause. You breathe in the intoxicating scent that drifts through the spaces. Suddenly, details emerge: a tiny embroidery, a disturbing texture, a piece of oxidised silver that seems almost alive beneath Venetian light. Perhaps that is the true surprise of this Fondazione, which will remain open only until 4 October before the palazzo undergoes essential restoration work: it manages to step outside the contemporary art world without becoming nostalgic. Van Noten is interested neither in sterile white cubes nor in digital promises of the future. He is interested in things that are made. The imperfect. The human. 

And, of course, this new role is fascinating from a biographical perspective. For decades, Dries Van Noten was regarded as fashion’s great poet – a designer who understood colour and fabric more emotionally than almost anyone else of his generation. Now he translates that sensitivity into spaces. Into atmospheres. Into curatorial dramaturgy. The palazzo becomes an inhabitable continuation of his collections. That Venice should be the perfect setting becomes immediately obvious. This city has always been a laboratory of beauty and decay. That is precisely why the exhibition works so well here. It does not attempt to explain the present. Instead, it creates entirely new moments of extraordinary intensity. 

To visit the Fondazione Dries Van Noten at Palazzo Pisani Moretta, visitors must purchase a Friend Card (€20) in advance. Details are available on fondazionedriesvannoten​.org. The Only True Protest Is Beauty runs until 4 October 2026. 

Nichts mehr verpassen – wir halten Sie auf dem Laufenden!

Melden Sie sich jetzt für unseren Newsletter an.