'The Art of Eating' from Flemish painters to Ferran Adrià

From 17th century still lifes by Flemish and Lombard painters, to surrealist images by Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol’s 32 Campbell's Soup Cans and Marina Abramovic’s Volcano Flambé, food has been a source of inspiration for artists for centuries. In recent years, the borders between visual and nutritious aspects of food have blurred even further, thanks to the increasingly complex and experimental phenomenon of haute cuisine popularized by master chefs such as Ferran Adrià, René Redzepi and Heston Blumenthal.

Investigating this intricate and close relationship between art and food over the centuries is an exhibition entitled, The Art of Eating: from ‘still life’ to Ferran Adrià, currently on view at Barcelona’s La Pedrera. Featuring over 130 food-themed works by renowned painters, sculptors, photographers and conceptual artists such as Paul de Vos, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Sarah Lucas, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Tacita Dean, Gordon Matta-Clark and Martin Parr, the exhibition has been curated by art-book editor and curator, Cristina Giménez, and surveys the theme of food as a subject or, even, as an artistic medium.

With a particular focus on artwork conceived in the 1960s and 1970s, as the exhibition explains 'when food and the act of eating, burst into the work of artists who were looking for other materials, new behaviours and new approaches to go beyond the representation of reality,' the exhibition focuses of the ongoing dialogue between art and gastronomy.

The culinary phenomenon of Ferran Adrià, who in 2007 became the first chef ever to be invited to participate in the German modern and contemporary art exhibition, Documenta 12, is displayed at the exhibition in a form of spectacular photographs from the 'Water Textures' series, taken in 2004 by the photographer Hans Gissinger.

A series of special events, including talks and seminars, family-friendly 'Creative Banquets', and sensory activities during which, in complete darkness, participants ‘will evoke the sense of taste and the sensations and flavours of food with poetry readings by blind rhapsodists' also takes place alongside this curious exhibition.

Malgorzata Stankiewicz