Thirty-eight couture gowns and twenty-six paintings now share the rooms of PM23 in Rome, where fashion house Valentino and Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz have staged a cross-disciplinary encounter titled "Aura." The exhibition sits in the foundation space of the late Valentino Garavani and his partner Giancarlo Giammetti, steps from the Spanish Steps, and runs through February 21, 2027.

Juszkiewicz, 42, has built her reputation by reworking historical portraits of women, copying their sumptuous garments while hiding their faces behind arrangements of cloth, hair, flowers or fruit. Here her canvases are paired with the actual Valentino gowns they echo: a red dress on an invisible mannequin faces a new life-size painting of the same garment from the house's Autumn/Winter 2007-08 haute couture collection, the sitter's face lost in a tangle of red fabric. The works ask how centuries of portraiture fixed ideals of female beauty, and what happens when those ideals are disrupted.

The show came together unusually fast. Pepi Marchetti Franchi, a senior director at Gagosian, learned in May that PM23 had a fall slot free, and moved Juszkiewicz's first solo museum exhibition - which had opened at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid - to Rome. The artist spent the summer in Valentino's archives, studying sketches and garments to find pairings, and painted A Portrait in Valentino Red for the opening. Lenders range from Giammetti himself to the artist's galleries Gagosian and Almine Rech, plus collectors including Glori Cohen and Away co-founder Jen Rubio.

The opening drew Rome's fashion and art circles, with former Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli, Met trustee Julia Koch and Christie's Alessandro Diotallevi among the guests at the Palazzo Torlonia afterparty. For Giammetti, the pairing answers a long-held conviction that fashion "needs to be in a dialogue with other arts."