What does one do after 38 years at the helm of a wildly successful namesake brand? Exit and buy a 15th-century palazzo in Venice with one’s partner. In 2024, after stepping away from fashion, Dries Van Noten did just that, signing paperwork in Italy alongside Patrick Vangheluwe. The result is Palazzo Pisani Moretta, once home to some of Venice’s most powerful families, now repurposed as Dries Van Noten’s Fondazione, currently staging its debut exhibition, “The Only True Protest Is Beauty”. On view until October 4, for anyone interested in seeing what resistance looks like with ceiling frescoes.
Geert Bruloot had quite a year himself. He started 2026 by curating the first major retrospective of The Antwerp Six (Dries Van Noten included). Now, he finds himself co-curating an entirely different scale of ambition alongside Van Noten in the Mediterranean. It takes more than one person to put together a mini biennale of over 200 works, drawn from nearly 50 artists. The show unfolds in loosely defined chapters, light and darkness, abstraction and transformation, nature, materiality, the body. There, a romantic Christian Lacroix gown sits beside a Comme des Garçons silhouette, which in turn sits beside Joseph Arzoumanov’s chess set, where an AI-programmed robotic arm moves the pieces. A Steven Shearer canvas appears nearby, a Casa Codognato ring catches the light somewhere along the way, and a Kaori Kurihara ceramic occupies its own little corner.
Everything here comes from the hand. Even the most curated version of beauty doesn’t escape that fact. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a 1960s Phil Ochs line written during the Vietnam War: “in such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.” In a setting where beauty has never exactly been in short supply, where does each of us turn to find it?
