Both cooking and making art are creative transformation processes. It is therefore not surprising that numerous artists are intensively involved with the preparation of food, work with organic materials, run restaurants and even write food manifestos. The exhibition shows works from 1960 to the present day.
Performance and conceptual artist Piero Manzoni created the Uova scultura from 1960, an egg signed with a fingerprint; several such eggs were eaten in a performance. Manzoni thus raised the shocking question: Is art allowed to be eaten?
In 1968, the father of Eat Art, Daniel Spoerri, opened his “Restaurant of the 7 Senses” in Düsseldorf, where artist events also took place. With his restaurant, Spoerri followed on from the Futurists' “Tavern of the Sacred Palate”, which opened its doors in 1931. And he has continued to inspire other artists to run restaurants with special concepts, such as Olafur Eliasson in Berlin and Carsten Höller with his brutalist restaurant in Stockholm.
Salvador Dalí should not be missing from this exhibition. His enthusiasm for food and sumptuous dinners, which he incorporated into the surrealist recipe book “Les dîners de Gala”, among other things, shows the connection between his art and food, as does his decades-long passion for bread.
The everyday nature of food preoccupied the artists of Pop Art, above all Andy Warhol. In the iconic video by Jᴓrgen Leth, he encounters visitors eating a hamburger, slowly and slightly unsure of the camera pointed at him. When he has finished, he explains: “I just finished eating a hamburger”.
Finally, Sonja Alhäuser has made working with food, including for sumptuous and wonderful banquets that can be eaten together in a festive way, the content of her art. Her works form the final point of the exhibition and form a link to Daniel Spoerri's “Restaurant of the 7 Senses”.
Also on display are works by:
Winfried Baumann, Boris Becker, Isabelle Enders, Dieter Froelich, Tobias Hantmann, Candida Höfer, Carsten Höller, Maik and Dirk Löbbert, Gordon Matta-Clark, Martin Parr, Claus Richter, Dieter Roth, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Arpad Dobridan, Juliane Hundertmark, Harry Kramer, Rona Pondick

The exhibition is a cooperation with the Kunsthalle Nürnberg