Food has long provided painters with a wealth of subject matter. The 17th Century Dutch masters depicted lavish spreads of game and fish for allegorical and symbolic purposes whilst for Chardin and Cezanne arrangements of fruit proved the ideal model for their investigations into perspective and form. When Goya and Soutine elected to paint slabs of raw meat they did so with an expressionistic gusto that asserted the materiality of paint and served as a poignant reminder of human corporeality. In the late 1950s and 1960s the American Pop Artists James Rosenquist and Wayne Thiebaud acknowledged the excesses of post-war production and consumption with their deadpan images of junk food and confectionary.
Gastrophoria is co-curated by Andreas Leventis.
Kindly supported by Royal Netherlands Embassy.