For centuries, art has featured food – from Stone Age caves to beautiful still lifes of the Dutch golden age. Today, some artists have taken step from painting pictures of food to making art out of the food itself, reimagining iconic works of art using fruits, vegetables, pasta and many other types of food.
The first project to be featured in this roundup is the Artisan Brunch series inspired by breakfast, the first and the most important meal of the day. Designer Kyle Bean, photographer Aaron Tilley and food stylist Lucy Ruth Hathaway have teamed up to mimic the famous works of five artists including Salvador Dali, Damien Hirst and Cornelia Parker using various brunch ingredients.
Jam dots on bread represent Yayoi Kusama, an avocado trapped in formaldehyde resembles Damien Hirst, while balancing pancake ingredients pays homage to Alexander Calder.
The trio also hung traditional English breakfast ingredients on string like Cornelia Parker would have done and draped sunny side-up eggs on a twig as a tribute to The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, which depicts a surreal scene of melting clocks in a natural landscape.
The Naaaan Time clock by Japanese artist Yukiko Morita has also been inspired by Dali’s famous 1931 painting. The newest edition to the creator’s PAMPSHADE collection, which features real baguettes, batards and croissants transformed into functional lamps, is a clock made from real naan bread.
To create the naan bread, Morita uses flour, salt, yeast and sugar. Since every unique piece is hand baked, it bears a different texture and expression. The resulting ‘loosely shaped and delicious-looking work of art’ is then covered with a layer of an anti-bacterial and anti-fungal sealant to protect the bread from decaying.
A clock dial and batteries added to the surface of the bread turns the edible into a functional object, although it only roughly tells you the time.
The Kunst in Wurst project started when Karsten Wegener, Silke Baltruschat and Raik Holst discovered the face in a piece of packaged ham at the refrigerated counter at a supermarket, which reminded the trio of The Scream by Edvard Munch with its shape, the arrangement of egg, cucumber, and carrot.
This ‘Scream made of ham’ inspired the team to look for more examples in art they could reinterpret with sausages. In some images the look of the bologna is the link to art, while in others it is the combination and arrangement of different ingredients, the packaging or the name of the product.