Food is a frequent subject in art throughout history. After all, food isn’t just vital to our livelihood, it also brings us great pleasure. Here are some very eye-catching and mouth-watering depictions of food by established contemporary artists of today that you’ll want to collect and share at your next dinner party. Bon appetit!
1. Zeng Fanzhi- ‘Meat Series’
Renowned Chinese contemporary artist Zeng Fanzhi achieved recognition in the 1990s for his “Hospital” and “Meat” paintings, both rendered in the artist’s signature fleshy red tones. In pairing men with butchered slabs of meat, the works from the Meat series pointed to Zeng’s ongoing concern with modernity’s problematic history (he grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution) and the isolation and instability of contemporary life in general. Later portraits of subjects like Francis Bacon and Stalin or the “Mask” paintings of well-dressed urbanites hiding behind masks further intensified this sense of alienation.
2. Yayoi Kusama- ‘Pumpkin’
As with many of the motifs that populate Kusama’s work, her love of the humble pumpkin stretches back to her childhood, when she
first encountered one growing on its vine and it began to speak to her, “in a most animated manner”. Since then she has found them to be “such tender things to touch, so appealing in colour and form”. A painting she made as a young woman of some pumpkins, using traditional Nihonga materials, won her a prize in a local competition, and with monastic fervour, she took to tirelessly reproducing them, mastering every contusion and bump. “I would confront the spirit of the pumpkin, forgetting everything else and concentrating my mind entirely on the form before me… I spent as much as a month facing a single pumpkin,” she wrote in her autobiography. Her pumpkins are now instantly recognisable, brightly coloured and covered in beetling black dots.
3. Luo Brothers- ‘Welcome Welcome’
Famous for creating iconic works from the oriental side of nature, established art group the Luo Brothers’ works are in effect a conglomeration of what makes up the modern Chinese society today.In their series ‘Welcome Welcome’, a Luo Brothers bouncing baby has held aloft most of the world’s foreign consumer food products. When one thinks about it, the same mix can be found in other cultures around the world. However, what’s so different and unique about the Chinese experience is the way it had happened so quickly. In the span of thirty years since the death of Chairman Mao, China had gone from a uniformly colorless society to one that makes our eyes and ears ache with the daily assaults of colors, lights and noise…. The Luo Brothers’ works are a successful reflection to this explosion of vitality.
4. Anton Molnar- ‘Luxurious Still Life’
To a traditional technique and formation, Hugarian-French contemporary still life master painter Anton Molnar allies a contemporary approach, a combination which makes his pieces so special. He considers painting an art of living, a language, a way to constantly questioning himself and his time. Today his works are part of important collections in Asia, America and Europe.
5. Ivan Korshunov- ‘Faberge’
Russian contemporary realism painter Ivan won various international art awards for his stunning depictions of the Russian traditional element, the ‘Faberge’ egg. He participated in many Russian and international exhibitions, where his exquisite artworks were highly appreciated by art critics and experts. Most part of his art works are made in oil on canvas technique. The main conception of his art works is the interaction of the semantic context and the forms of plastic expression. The incredible light and shade game that reveals expressive texture and volume of the object refers to the traditions of Western European painting in the Baroque style.
6. Ju Duoqi- ‘Vegetable Art’
‘In the summer of ’06, I bought several kilograms of peas, and sat there quietly for two days peeling them, before stringing them on a wire and turning them into a skirt, a top, a headdress and a magic wand. I used a remote control to take a photo of myself in them, and named it Pea Beauty Pageant. That was my first work of vegetable art.’ – Chinese contemporary photographer Ju Duoqi
In the next two years, Ju often dressed up as a housewife, leisurely strolling to the market and pacing in front of the vegetable stalls, picking things up, thinking and putting them back, trying to figure out which positions made them more interesting. She no longer needed models as veggies became actors and even props. As a director, Ju directed them to restage La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, and called it La Liberté Guidant les Légumes.
7. Peter Anton- ‘Candy Mania’
“I like to create art that can lure, charm, tease, disarm and surprise,” American pop artist Peter Anton produces oversized, lushly detailed, delicious-looking, and subtly unsettling sculptures of food, especially sweets. “I have an innate reverence for the things we eat,” he says. “Food brings people together and there is no better way to celebrate life. Anton plays with scale, blowing up donuts, lollipops, boxes of chocolate, and banana splits into absurdly large, somewhat menacing proportions. Viewers are more likely to be consumed by his colorful confections than able to consume them. Concerned with craft as much as concept, Anton carefully renders each detail of his sculptures, down to every last sugar crystal.
