Chef & Artist, Cooking & Art

Chef & Artist, Cooking & Art

Mini Exhibit
August 2017

In 2007, Ferran Adrià was contentiously invited to documenta, a prestigious exhibition of contemporary art that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. Adrià set up his exhibition space 850 miles away from Kassel on the coast of Catalonia’s Costa Brava, where his restaurant elBulli is located. Adrià engages with molecular gastronomy, an avant-garde style of cuisine which scientifically manipulates food to create surprising textures, colors, and shapes. Adrià's food art is innovative in its playful deconstruction of flavors, but it also takes on a higher form which transcends the individual ceramic plate. His tasting menu has been described as having a rhythm and a flow, with the precision and timing of the waiters and sommeliers requiring choreographies of their own. Adrià believes that with elBulli he has “turned eating into an experience that supersedes eating,” suggesting that a night out to a restaurant is equivalent to spending one’s time in a theater, cinema, or art gallery. This exhibit makes the case that chef and artist, cooking and art is indeed co-extensive. On display is the cookbook of a surrealist artist, the still-life photographs of an English vegetable gardener, the food manifesto of Italian art theorists, and a book on elBulli, among other titles about Spanish artworks fixated on food.

Aida Garrido ‘18

On Display:

1. Salvador Dalí
    Les Dîners de Gala, conceived by Salvador Domenech Philippe Hyacinthe Dali.
   Trans. by Captain J. Peter Moore. 
   Cologne: Taschen, 2016
   Marquand, TX725.A1 D2313 2016q

2. Aterido, Ángel
   Juan Fernández, el Labrador: Naturalezas Muertas
   Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2013
   Marquand, ND813.L232 A4 2013

3. Barceló, Miquel
   Miquel Barceló: terra mare
   Text by Jean Clottes, Alberto Manguel and Éric Mézil.
   Arles: Actes Sud; London: Thames & Hudson, 2010
   Marquand, N7113.B367 A4 2010

4. Food For Thought, Thought For Food, ed. Richard Hamilton and Vicente Todolí.
   Barcelona and New York: Actar, 2009
   Marquand, TX723.5.S7 F66 2009

5. Jones, Charles
   Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones
   New York: Smithmark, 1998
   Marquand Photography, TR724 .J65 1998

6. Marinetti, F. T.
   The Futurist Cookbook, ed. Lesley Chamberlain. Trans. by Suzanne Brill.
   San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989
   Marquand, TX723 .M32913 1989

7. Ortiz-Echagüe, José
   José Ortiz-Echagüe: Photographs
   London: G. Fraser, 1979
   Marquand Photography, TR654 .O745 1979