“There is art in everything we do.” 4 dinner events, a creative dialogue between Artist & Chef in collaboration with the MICHELIN Guide in honor of illy’s 10-year partnership with Biennale Arte

Venice, July 2019. illycaffè, in honor of their collaboration with the Venice Biennale for the 58th International Art Exposition May You Live In Interesting Times, is organizing a series of four outstanding dinner-events, realized with the MICHELIN Guide and taking place within the lauded restaurant Le Bombarde dell’Arsenale. One by one, guests will bear witness to a creative dialogue between artist – chosen by curator Ralph Rugoff – and a Michelin-starred chef – selected by the Guide itself. Together, chef and artist will give life to a unique experience, available to the public for purchase online only by way of the MICHELIN Guide, and including a private visit to the exhibition.

 

“To celebrate our profound bond with Biennale Arte, which we’ve renewed this year for the 10th consecutive edition,” explains Massimiliano Pogliani, CEO of illycaffè, “we have developed a project in which contemporary art collides with cuisine, creating contamination and proposing a truly one of a kind, unedited experience: a concept that can be synthesized by our message ‘there is art in everything we do.’ The union of taste with beauty is at the core of our brand and our company’s mission statement, and it is kept alive thanks to these creative opportunities for exchange, which become a new artistic form”.

Part of the proceeds from the dinner will be donated to the digital photo project of Ar- chivio, the Historic Archives of Contemporary Art at the Venice Biennale.

Each artist was given the opportunity to decorate an espresso cup inspired by the project which will become part of a special edition series within the illy Art Collection releasing this coming fall 2019.

Calendar of dinners:

 

July 16, 2019
Artist: Cameron Jamie & Chef: Guy Martin 2**

September 9, 2019
Artist: Adriana AD Minoliti - Chef Niko Romito 3***

September 23, 2019
Artist: Slavs & Tatars - Chef Juan Amador 3***

October 7, 2019
Artist: Ulrike Muller - Chef Sang Hoon Degeimbre 2**

for reservations and information: www.guida.michelin.it

July 16, 2019

Cameron Jamie
1969 U.S.A.

Cameron Jamie works with different artistic mediums ranging from photography to video, from ceramic china design, to sculpture, to fanzine photocopies. The installation that best defined his work in the initial phase of his career was Kranky Klaus (2002-2003), a video documenting Krampuslauf, an alpine Christmas tradition. In a mountain town in rural Austria, men dressed as horned beasts take to the streets by night in search of misbehaving children and young women. Once identified, the Krampus attack the victims in a ritual of staged violence, which appears to be completely real.

 

 

Guy Martin
1957 France

Self-taught and guided by multiple passions, Guy Martin began his career as a pizza chef, climbing the steps of haute cuisine to eventually healm, in 1991, one of France’s most iconic and monumental institutions of culinary history: the Grand Véfour in Paris, the same decorative 18th century jewel that hosted Bonaparte and Joséphin, Lamartine, and Hugo when it was known as Caffè de Chartres. Guy Martin continuously renews the splendor of a great gourmand experience celebrated by international guides and awards. His excellent cuisine, exalted by pristine ingredients, also draws upon eclectic information gathered from travels and from art, creating ethereal and original dishes bound by a core of traditional, haute cuisine doused with originality.

 

 

September 9, 2019

AD Minoliti
1980 Argentina

For Ad Minoliti metaphysical painting is the symbol of modernist utopia and all of its reprehensible aspects: ideals aimed at repression, rigid and conservative structures and even the implicit “binary logic”, linked to Jacques Derrida’s theory according to which Western thought is based on dualistic contrasts such as male-female, rational-emotional, or nature-culture. Minoliti’s artistic commitment, therefore, is aimed at creating an alternative space of representation that opposes this modernist position. The artist has found a dialectical counterpart to the space of metaphysical painting in the imaginary world of dollhouses. Invented in the seventeenth century, the dollhouse was born as a pedagogical tool to explain to young girls their future roles as housewives, mothers and wives – a philosophy and division of tasks that they were meant to accept. Minoliti appropriates the aesthetics of the doll’s house and its props and combines it with modernist imagery that recalls Kandinskij, Picasso or Matisse, proceeding to tear it to pieces, distort, modify and completely reconfigure this ideal.

 

 

Niko Romito
1974 Italy

Since 2000, Niko Romito has helmed the kitchen of restaurant Reale, originally intended to be the family patisserie. A failed broker turned self-taught cook, Romito is deeply tied to his territory. In just 7 years he was awarded 3 Michelin stars, not to mention important accolades in Italy and abroad. In 2011 Romito transported Reale from Rivisondoli to a former ‘500 monastery in Castel di Sangro, called “Casadonna”: it was here that he inaugurated a boutique hotel and a professional cooking school. In 2013 he founded Spazio, a network of restaurant-laboratories managed by young graduates, a first of its kind concept in Italy. In 2016 he presented the project “IN-Intelligenza Nutrizionale”, an innovative scientific kitchen protocol designed for commercial catering, imagined for hospitals in particular. Entrepreneurial instinct and gastronomic sensitivity are inseparable for Romito. His dishes demonstrate how relentless pursuit meets essentiality, balance and taste. In just a few years Romito has succeeded in creating a strong and personal culinary language completely devoid of obvious references.

 

 

September 23, 2019

Slavs & Tatars

Slavs & Tatars came onto the scene in 2006 as a reading group, and then evolved into an artistic collective whose multi-faceted practice remained deeply connected to language, both literally and figuratively. Their works, ranging from sculptures to lecture performances, represent an unconventional research approach to the cultural variety and complexity of the geographical area between two barriers, both symbolic and physical: the old Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China. In this vast territory, East and West collide, merging into one another and redefining each other.

 

 

Juan Amador
1968 Austria

German with Spanish roots, Juan Amador had already pocketed years of success on the German cooking scene and a successful repertoire of accolades before he opened the elegant Amador restaurant in Vienna. Lying on the edge of the historic center, Amador is housed in an open-vaulted cellar with a long brick archway. It is considered the most avant-garde restaurant in the city boasting 3 Michelin stars. The chef’s cuisine is defined as personal, technical and multicultural; local products form the core but with distinctive Asian and Mediterranean influence. The always-surprising menu is full of skillfully harmonized contrasts, a modern touch on European cuisine which has made Amador one of the most successful chefs on the international scene.

 

 

October 7, 2019

Ulrike Müller
1971 Austria

Ulrike Müller works with various media (enamel painting, prints, and carpets) to express a graphic and rigorous formalism, full of feminist and queer possibilities. The artist creates meticulous surfaces that stimulate an intimate gaze, carefully organizing the exhibition space, working with architecture and hanging the works at unconventional heights to underline how a gallery is also a container.

 

 

Sang Hoon Degeimbre
1969 Belgium

Born in South Korea but adopted by a Belgian family, San Hoon enrolled in pharmaceutical school as a boy, later abandoning it for hotel school followed by a specialization in butchery and later, studying to be a sommelier. Sang Hoon began working in the dining room and cellar where he found his destiny. In 1997 he embarked on what he described as his most important “essential journey,” opening his restaurant Air du Temp in Noville sur Mehaigne, near Namur, with his wife Carine. Here, he combines sensitivity with a transversal education, his personal idea of cooking – using products derived from a maximum 15km radius (with the exception of spices) – evolved over twenty years in search of identity. His dishes are highly conceptualized: mapping all-natural ingredients according to their aromatic molecules to find tastes affinities or taste idiosyncrasies to create pairings or substitutions.