Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

ART

IN PICS: Picasso’s ties to the kitchen explored at Barcelona show

A deformed bottle of wine, a colander in the place of a woman's head or a ceramic plate with inlaid fish bones: For the first time, the intimate connection between Pablo Picasso's work and gastronomy is on display in his Barcelona museum.

Published: 29 May 2018 15:23 CEST
IN PICS: Picasso's ties to the kitchen explored at Barcelona show
Photos: Pau Barrena / AFP

“It's a new vision of Picasso,” Emmanuel Guigon, director of the Picasso Museum in the Mediterranean seaside city, told AFP at Wednesday's inauguration of the exhibition “Picasso's Kitchen.”

“It seems weird but it isn't. Cooking is a theme that is in all Picasso's work and in all formats: paintings, sculptures, pottery and even poetry.”   

Strolling through the exhibition is like making one's way through a multi-course meal, with more than 180 works of art — some of them borrowed from other museums or private collections — scattered in 10 rooms.

Cherry on the cake — one room has been designed by Spanish gastronomy's Picasso, molecular gastronomy chef Ferran Adria, who has imposed his vision of the creative process in the kitchen with diagrams and photos of his dishes.   

Ferran Adria speaks next to “Young Boy with Lobster” by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Photo: AFP

READ ALSO:Chef Ferran Adrià to reopen Spain's El Bulli as food lab in 2019

Adrià, founder of the El Bulli restaurant which was voted world's best five times before closing in 2011, said Picasso and former FC Barcelona player and coach Johan Cruyff, one of football's most visionary figures who died in 2016, were his “two creative references”.

“To be here is a dream, twenty years ago this would have been impossible,” he said.

“But today in art there are people who are interested in what we are doing,an entire generation of chefs who want to be on the forefront.”   

“In a 100 years my dishes can't be shown in any museum,” Adria joked.   

“But to understand his system of creation and how he worked helps us to analyse and compare it to ours.”

'Metaphor of creation'

The exhibition, which will run until September 30th, “is not a catalogue of ingredients…it is a metaphor of creation”, of how an everyday objects becomes art or a memory, said the curator of the show, Androula Michel.   

Everyday objects such as a bottle of wine, a roasted chicken or fish are depicted by Picasso as disfigured still lifes in his cubist style.   

A colander represents the head of a woman in one sculpture while a painting of two leeks next to a skull depict the hardships in Paris during the Second World War.

The exhibition has borrowed works from around 30 museums and private collections, including some of Picasso's most famous creations such as his 1914 sculpture “Glass of Absinthe” and his 1914 painting “Restaurant”.   

Also on show is his “Bullfight and fish” ceramic plate in which Picasso incrusted the fish bones of a sole.

It is displayed alongside a photo taken by David Douglas Duncan of Picasso while he ate the fish in Cannes.

The relationship between Picasso's work and the kitchen “is something obvious that has never been explored before,” said Guigon.   

“I hope people will enjoy this menu a great deal,” he added.

By AFP's Daniel Bosque 

ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

SHOW COMMENTS