Dries Van Noten, the Belgian designer known for his intricate textiles and restless creativity, is planting roots in Venice. Next month, he and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe are launching the Fondazione Dries Van Noten in a 15th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal—a space designed to feel less like a museum and more like a living workshop where artists, designers, and craftspeople at every level can create, collaborate, and show their work.
The foundation occupies Palazzo Pisani Moretta, a Gothic-fronted building in the San Polo neighborhood that's been refined by Venetian artists over centuries. Rather than preserve it as a monument, Van Noten and Vangheluwe see it as a stage. "Venice is more than a weekend destination," they said in a statement. "It's a city full of life, from its markets to its young residents." The space will host residencies, presentations, and collaborative projects—a pulsing venue where the boundary between past and present, local and international creativity, dissolves.
Architect Alberto Torsello is overseeing the renovation, with a satellite studio opening later this year. The foundation's core belief is straightforward: all creative expression comes from human skill and gesture. In a city built on centuries of craftsmanship—glassblowing, textile work, stone carving—that philosophy feels less like an abstract ideal and more like a return to first principles.
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Opening with beauty as protest
The inaugural exhibition, opening April 25, is titled "THE ONLY TRUE PROTEST IS BEAUTY." Van Noten and fellow Belgian designer Geert Bruloot curated it around a deceptively simple idea: beauty as a question, not an answer. Not escape, but engagement. When beauty allows for ambiguity and contradiction, when it unsettles rather than soothes, it becomes a form of resistance.
The show spreads across 20 rooms and gathers over 200 objects—couture by Christian Lacroix and Comme des Garçons alongside sculptures by Joyce J. Scott, photographs by Steven Shearer, and work by emerging Palestinian designer Ayham Hassan. There are ceramics by Rebecca Manson and Kaori Kurihara, glass pieces, jewelry, and material experiments. The mix is deliberately unpredictable: established names sit next to emerging voices, established mediums next to experimental ones.
It's the kind of curatorial move that only works in a space designed around genuine exchange rather than hierarchy. Van Noten has spent his career insisting that fashion is as worthy of serious attention as fine art. This foundation feels like his answer to that conviction: a place where the distinction stops mattering altogether.
The foundation opens to the public during Venice's art season, positioning itself as a counterweight to the Biennale's biennial rhythm. If it works, it could become something rare in Venice—a venue that treats the city not as a frozen archive, but as a living thing with ideas still circulating.
