ZAX’s December “Fertility Meal,” put together by artists/guest chefs Maia Ruth Lee and Violet Dennison, included “Estrogen Seeds” (an appetizer made with anise and sugar crystals) and “New Mother Nourishment Soup” (seaweed, daikon, enoki mushrooms, shishito peppers, miso, and fingerling potatoes), among other peculiar dishes and libations. For a few extra dollars, heat acupuncture was also part of the meal. Though Stewart has put his restaurant-in-a-studio on hold, he plans to bring it back in Greenpoint sometime in April.
8 Artist-Run Food Establishments, from Los Angeles to Berlin
In the fall of 1971, the doors of a curious restaurant located at 127 Prince Street opened just south of New York’s Houston Street. Inside, if you were hungry, an artist might ladle you a steaming bowl of caldo gallego from one of three large cauldrons bubbling away over a low stove in the center of the room. Soup in hand, you’d make your way to a table where slices of bread were stacked around a huge heap of butter. Come another night and you might’ve been served the now-famous “bone dinner”—frogs’ legs and roasted marrow bones, among other skeletal dishes—then left with the remnants, rigorously cleaned and given a second life as wearable jewelry.
This was the restaurant and conceptual art project Food, run by artists Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others. Given a mini-retrospective at Frieze New York’s 2013 fair, involving several of the original chefs, the short-lived project has secured its place as one of the most iconic blurrings of the lines between art and food. The 1970s Soho establishment is far from the only artistic foray into the culinary realm, however, so we checked in on a handful that have been around for years, and a few others that are still taking shape.
Zagreus Projekt
Ulrich Krauss
Berlin
An in-progress meal at Zagreus Projekt. Courtesy of Zagreus Projekt.
“Food and art were the two elements in my life that were always there,” explains Ulrich Krauss, the founder of the Berlin food project space Zagreus Projekt. “I grew up in a butcher shop and I studied art.” He went on to apprentice as a chef, spending time cooking at a fancy hotel in southern Germany. “When you are in that world, it is so restricted, and you have rules for everything,” Krauss says. “It’s a very narrow world, so I got the feeling I had to escape from that.” Krauss left for Berlin, where he balanced artmaking—mostly performances—with cooking in restaurants. “I have to found a place where I bring things together,” he remembers thinking of his double life. Zagreus Projekt took shape.
Its first iteration found a home in the backroom of Galerie Markus Richter, a space for conceptual and minimal art that shuttered in 2005. Since then, Zagreus Projekt, which Krauss is careful to point out is not a gallery, has relocated to the elegant Mitte district. Artists bring ideas for exhibitions that in some way relate back to food, and a collaboration ensues to devise a menu that matches. FOOD ART, a collaboration that launches April 8th, pairs the talents of the artist-turned-chef with a Swiss-German artist couple, Hendrikje Kühne and Beat Klein, who make elaborate, three-dimensional collage sculptures, often including images of food and fragments of advertising and newspapers. “With every exhibition we do here, we have a different point of view on food or on the situation of eating, and that is the most important thing,” Krauss explains. But the demands of the project, 16 years on, are not without their toll. “I don’t see myself as an artist anymore,” says Krauss. “I see myself as a chef.”
Pharmacy 2
Damien Hirst
Newport Street Gallery, London
The interior of Pharmacy 2. Courtesy of Prudence Cuming Associates © 2H Restaurant Ltd. All rights reserved, 2016.
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Damien Hirst, dispenser of hand-painted pills and shark vitrines, blends two environments to unusual effect in his newest restaurant endeavor, Pharmacy 2, which opened at his Newport Street Gallery several weeks ago. After taking in vibrant work by John Hoyland, one of Britain’s key abstract painters, a Hirst devotee can round out the experience in the new spot. Uniquely crafted pills dot the marble floor, and a clinically cool neon sign that reads “prescriptions” hangs over the bar in view of works from Hirst’s “Medicine Cabinets” and “Kaleidescope paintings.”
Diners enjoy chef-collaborator Mark Hix’s cooking, which eschews pharmaceuticals for fresh ingredients and a British-inflected menu of European classics, including crispy squid with green chilis or Hix’s riff on the traditional German apples-and-potatoes side “Heaven and Earth.” “Damien designed a formaldehyde ‘Cock and Bull’ for my restaurant Tramshed, so it makes sense for me to exchange my skills,” the chef explains.
“Art in restaurants is on the same level as food in museums” – Niles Crane
Erik Benjamins // Kathrin Böhm // Alex Brenchley // Celine Condorelli // Mike Cooter // Simon Dybbroe Møller // George Little // Bruce McLean // Bella Pace // Amanda Ross-Ho // Ettore Sottsass for Alessi // Curated by Lauren Godfrey
August 14, 2015
to October 3, 2015
Free & open to all
Opening night: Friday 14th August 6 – 9pm
‘“Art in restaurants is on the same level as food in museums” – Niles Crane’, is an exhibition exploring the positioning of food and art within each other’s spaces. Although perhaps not traditionally contextualised together, food and art commonly occupy the same environments, even fusing together at times, with food represented in art – or even as art – in both the gallery and restaurant.
As restaurants or cafes have now become the standard within most major museums, and with art adorning the walls of many a dining establishment, each are exploited in the other’s space as an added level of engagement. But to speak of ‘levels’ of food and art is also to bring about their similarities, as potential sources of enjoyment, fulfilment and creativity yes, but also as being both highly concerned with satisfying personal and cultural tastes – and what value we might put on doing so.
For this exhibition Turf’s gallery space is transformed into an ambiguous restaurant-style environment, but the menu here undeniably is art. Encouraging our own reflections on the place-based distinctions between art and food, curator Lauren Godfrey has sourced tables and chairs that double up as plinths for other works, whilst Bella Pace’s commissioned sign adds a further dimension to the site-specificity of the show.
Featuring the work of eleven emerging and established artists, and accompanied by a text from Lauren Godfrey, the show draws on historical representations of food in art, as well as current conceptualisations of how the two come together. Considering some of the institutional and conceptual frameworks around food and art, it further draws upon their status as both sensorial and social objects.
Visitors are invited to consider these relationships through their own choices and definitions in the space, whilst a series of events accompanying the exhibition encourage further live interaction with these ideas.
The exhibition was made possible by the generous sponsorship of Arts Council England and Mayor of London.
SOLD OUT
We invite you to indulge all your senses in this glorious evening of food, merriment, and art! Local chefs from Columbia are invited to pick a piece of art from the gallery to use as inspiration for a dish of finger food. We welcome you to enjoy this food with us, meet our chefs, and celebrate with other guests!
2023 Chef Line-Up!
TS Sweets
Pastry Chef Trish SIECKMANN
Trish founded Flour Power in 2016, and in 2022 rebranded to become TS Sweets. She has been actively making cakes and pastries for over 20 years. TS Sweets is a small bakery being run from the shared kitchen called CoMo Cooks, where she is currently the new kitchen manager.
University of Missouri Athletics Dining
Chef Stephen Evans
A career-long kitchen rat, Chef Stephen Evans started in the dish room at a local restaurant in his hometown of Las Cruces, NM at the age of fifteen. During his time there he worked his way out and up to prep, salad, and line cook positions before enlisting in the United States Navy where he attended culinary school. After graduating, he was shipped off to the flagship of the sixth fleet, the USS LaSalle which was stationed in Gaeta, Italy. While serving aboard the LaSalle he held positions as a mess chef, chief’s galley chef, night baker and starboard watch captain for the crew. After the Navy he worked as a banquet chef while attending New Mexico State University and earned a bachelor’s degree in Hotel Restaurant and Tourism Management. Shortly after graduation he moved to Columbia, Missouri where he now resides and has been the head chef of Mizzou Athletic Dining for the last ten years. Evans believes years of feeding thousands of sailors definitely helped prepare him for feeding hundreds of hungry collegiate student athletes daily. He enjoys cooking and says “The way I see it is that I just go to work every day and cook dinner for myself and four hundred of my friends.” When he is not in the kitchen he passes his time exploring other creative endeavors such as painting and poetry. His art and cooking are creative outlets and he looks forward to the opportunity of letting you eat his art.
