Château Mouton Rothschild’s Reveals Its 2023 Artist Label

Photo Credit: Château Mouton Rothschild

At Château Mouton Rothschild, art has never been an accessory. It has always been part of the soul of the wine. Since 1945, every vintage has carried an original artwork on its label — not as decoration, but as a statement that what lives inside the bottle belongs as much to the world of creation as it does to viticulture. For the 2023 vintage, that lineage expands in a new direction with the quiet arrival of Joana Vasconcelos, the first Portuguese artist to join the estate’s storied visual canon.

Photo Credit: Château Mouton Rothschild

Her piece, Paraíso, is small in scale but expansive in meaning. At its center: a cluster of grapes, the most elemental symbol of wine itself. Around it, the forces that make the vineyard breathe — earth, water, sunlight, night air, and finally the steady intervention of human hands. The composition unfolds like a living ecosystem, each form interlocking with the next, suggesting that great wine is never the result of a single moment, but of balance sustained over time. The title, Portuguese for “Paradise,” is not aspirational so much as observant — a reflection of the Pauillac terroir as it exists in quiet perfection season after season.

For Vasconcelos, the challenge was not only to translate her typically monumental visual language into an intimate format, but to distill an entire philosophy into a few inches of paper. “My inspiration came from the grapes and the vines and the natural soul of the château,” she has said. “Paraíso reflects an idea of perfection, of luxury, and of harmony between nature and man.”

Photo Credit: ©Joana Vasconcelos Atelier

That harmony is what first drew Julien de Beaumarchais de Rothschild to her work years ago. He encountered it in grand, theatrical form at the Palace of Versailles, and later again at Madrid’s Liria Palace, where her contemporary installations were set in dialogue with centuries-old masterpieces. What captivated him wasn’t scale alone, but process — the way she transforms traditional materials through patience, craftsmanship, and imagination.

She works with embroidery, crochet, domestic textiles — elements rooted in heritage and labor — and elevates them into something monumental, sometimes playful, sometimes provocative. For him, the parallel to winemaking was immediate. At Mouton, tradition is never static. It is something lived, reshaped, and renewed with each harvest. Each vintage, like each artwork, becomes singular — never to be replicated in exactly the same way again.

Photo Credit: ©Mathieu Anglada

Vasconcelos’ career has always moved between intimacy and immensity. Born in 1971, she rose to international recognition in 2005 with The Bride at the Venice Biennale. Since then, her work has traveled through some of the most revered cultural spaces in the world — from the Guggenheim Bilbao to the Uffizi Galleries and Pitti Palace in Florence. In a historic milestone, she became the first woman and the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles. Her work wrestles with themes of identity, femininity, craft, and consumer culture, often with wit and irony layered beneath luminous surfaces. In 2022, France recognized her contribution with the Order of Arts and Letters.

To place her within the lineage of Mouton’s labels is to situate her among an extraordinary assembly of artists who have shaped the visual memory of wine itself — Picasso, Dalí, Chagall, Warhol, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Jeff Koons, Olafur Eliasson, among them. Together, their works form a living archive that resides not in a museum alone, but on tables, in cellars, and in the hands of collectors around the world. At Mouton, art is not observed at a distance; it is opened, poured, and shared.