The material culture of women is never far beneath the surface of Joana Vasconcelos’s maximalist sculptures. The Portuguese artist came to international acclaim with a chandelier-shaped sculpture, A Novia (The Bride; 2001–5), first exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennial. Made of approximately 14,000 tampons, the twenty-foot-high work constructed drama from an object associated with fertility and silence. Fast-forward two decades and Andrea Sheehan’s portrait of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg assembled from hand-painted tampons now graces the lobby of Hotel Zena in Washington, D.C., while a taboo-breaking tampon-sex scene appears in Miranda July’s popular perimenopause novel All Fours (2024). Vasconcelos’s prescient choice of material offered a vision of beauty shaped by objects that continue, for some, to be associated with shame...

Joana Vasconcelos: Transfiguration is on view at Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain through September 26, 2026.