Miku Sato – River Water Miso Soup
Currently screening in Kitchen-Studio at MAY SPACE is Miku Sato’s film Soup: Japan and Taiwan Version. This is the second film in her Soup series that first began in 2011 in Seoul, South Korea. In this work, Sato cooks miso soup with water collected from the Ooka River in Yokohama where she lives. Sato is...
Futurists – Cubist Vegetable Patch
In 1932, two full decades after the first Futurist Manifesto, Italian artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published La Cucina Futurista (The Futurist Cookbook); a collection of culinary related statements, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of banquets, and “formulas,” the Futurist term for recipes. This volume, which functions as an archive, outlines the various ways the Futurists used...
Alison Knowles – Salad
In 1962 Alison Knowles conceptualised a set of written instructions, also called event scores, titled Propositions. Number two of the set simply states “Make a salad”; a command that she has implemented over the past fifty years at a number of events. The simplicity of the written instructions allows for an expansive interpretation of the...
Rirkrit Tiravanija – Curry Paste
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents and now lives between Berlin and New York City. He uses food as a tool to facilitate social exchange in his “situations”. Beginning in 1989, he began using cooking as a means to create an art experiences where he cooks and serves meals to visitors....
Gösta Diehl – Pan-fried Salmon
The Finnish artist Gösta Diehl was active in the first half of the 20th century and was known for his use of vivid colour in his paintings often composed in a cubist style. In July 2015, I travelled to Helsinki, Finland to spend a week in the studio of artist Elizabeth Willing while she was...
Otto van Schrieck – Chicken, Mushroom & Feta Risotto
Otto van Schrick was a Dutch painter of Golden Age who according to the Musee de Beaux Arts, “invented a particular genre half-way between still life and landscape painting.” His dark and sombre compositions of flora and fauna often contained lizards and snakes alongside the flowers and mushrooms scattered on the forest floor. The painting above...
Vincent van Gogh – Bloody Mary
Vincent van Gogh‘s Still-Life with Mackerels, Lemons and Tomatoes (1886) was painted the year the artist moved from Antwerp, where he had very little to eat and no money, to Paris where he lived with his brother Theo. While living in Antwerp, he spent much of his time studying the work of Peter Paul Rubens...
Henri Matisse – Stuffed Eggplant
The 1911 painting Still Life with Aubergines by Henri Matisse exemplifies the characteristics of the Fauvist movement with the wild brushstrokes and incongruent colours. The painting was completed during a period of flux in Matisse’s oeuvre, During this time in his career he was influenced by travel to Algeria and a major exhibition of Islamic Art...
Elizabeth Willing – Pfeffernüsse
A focal point in the exhibition Sugar, Sugar at Brenda May Gallery is the installation Goosebump, the 7-metre wall covered with over 300 pfeffernüsse biscuits. It took the Brisbane-based artist Elizabeth Willing over a day and a half to create the entire installation and visitors were invited to bite the cookies from the wall starting on...
Mylyn Nguyen – Sweet Tea
Only one more week until we install Sugar, Sugar at Brenda May Gallery! The work has started to arrive at the Gallery and I am incredibly proud of this exhibition, all of the artists are outstanding. The artwork below is one of the pieces included in the show and I was a bit more literal...
Janet Tavener – Asparagus Pie
The Sugar, Sugar exhibition will be installed at Brenda May Gallery in about three weeks and in the lead-up to the show, I will be sharing a selection of the work that will be on view. You can see Mylyn Nguyen’s carved sugar cube in the current issue of Vogue Living. This is the second...
Gustave Courbet – Smoked Trout Smørrebrød
Smørrebrød is the Danish tradition of open-face sandwiches. A dark dense bread, usually a type of rye, is toasted and topped with smoked or pickled fish and other vegetables. In this version, the smoked trout is the star and so it is essential to purchase high-quality fish. I picked up a whole fish and carefully...