Photo by Hans Gissinger. From the series "Water Textures," 2004.
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In 2004, Hans Gissinger produced a series of images at famed chef Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli restaurant in Spain titled “Water Textures.” In the series, which comprises 19 photos, Hans finds in ordinary water a wildly diverse range of aesthetic possibilities and pictorial equivalents. The shapes and degree of transparency in one image might evoke a slide seen through a scientist’s microscope, while another photo resembles a closeup of dazzling jewels and still another conjures ribbons of clear plastic. It’s stunning work.
This month, a handful of the “Water Textures” images will be on view in an exhibition set to open in Barcelona on Monday, March 14. “The Art of Eating: From Dead Nature to Ferran Adrià,” organized by the Caixa Catalunya Foundation, “offers a wide-ranging vision of the close and productive relationship between art and food over the centuries, creating multiple formal and conceptual connections,” according to the show’s press materials.
The exhibition, curated by Cristina Giménez, will feature a display on Adrià that will showcase Hans’ “Water Textures,” at the request of the chef. “The exhibition…intends to champion the radical and experimental side of fine cuisine, the chief exponent here being the remarkable figure of Ferran Adrià,” according to the press materials. “Gourmet cooking is regarded as a practice with codes and procedures that are in an osmotic relationship with art: cuisine as composition, as provocation, as thought.”
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Photo by Hans Gissinger. From the series "Water Textures," 2004.
Photo by Hans Gissinger. From the series "Water Textures," 2004.
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On view through July 10, “The Art of Eating” will also feature many other bold-faced names from the art world, including Chantal Akerman, Joseph Beuys, Gordon Matta-Clark, Martha Rosler, Paul McCarthy, Marina Abramovic, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mona Hatoum, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sarah Lucas, Sandy Skoglund, Tacita Dean, and Martin Parr.
For more information, go here. And to see more of Hans’ “Water Textures” series, go here.
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