Delicacies

Cookery shows on all TV channels, bestselling cookery books, gourmet festivals and street food markets, countless food photos on social networks and a growing awareness of healthy and sustainable nutrition - food is playing an increasingly important role in our society and is shaping many areas of our everyday lives. Today, food is no longer just a basic need, but a cultural phenomenon and political statement.

This social development is the starting point for the exhibition "Delicatessen - Between Art and Cuisine". The current exploration of the border area between art and cuisine is presented on the basis of 23 artistic positions. A wide variety of aspects are presented: Starting from the level of aesthetic reflection to that of sensual experience through to the field of political problems.

Depictions of food go back a long way. They were already very popular in antiquity, as numerous surviving wall paintings in Egyptian tombs and Roman villas prove. They reached their peak in the still lifes of 17th century Dutch painting. Juicy fruit, plump vegetables and sumptuous dishes arranged for consumption not only served as a feast for the eyes, but also symbolised physicality and life, transience and death in a metaphorical sense.

It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that real food was used in the visual arts. In the 1930s, it was the Italian Futurists who came up with the idea of using food as an artistic material and declaring the preparation of food to be an artistic act. In the 1960s, artists such as Daniel Spoerri, Piero Manzoni, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys and Gordon Matta-Clark independently explored the cultural significance of eating and cooking, the fundamental principles of nutrition and eating as an existential act.

The artistic approach to food ties in with an elementary interface between art and life: The reality of daily life is integrated into art, a contextual reference is made to the fundamental things of everyday life. Fundamental existential questions often arise more forcefully in connection with food than with other themes. This topic is therefore still highly relevant for contemporary artists.

Last edited on 03.03.2025