Between the Culinary and the Visual: Ferran Adrià at New York’s Drawing Center

Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity is the first show focused on Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s visualization and drawing practices. New York’s Drawing Center, with the collaboration of Institut Ramon Llul, Spanish Cultural Action (AC/E) and Lavazza, will be showcasing this exhibition from January 26 to March 1.

The display highlights the role of drawing in Ferran Adrià’s culinary research, taken as a basic element to understand his creativity. This mean, which is used as a philosophic tool – to organize and share knowledge, meaning and significance – and physic object, allows us to summarize over twenty years of innovation in the sphere of author cuisine.

Described as one of the most important avant-garde chefs of the 21st century, Adrià pushes culinary bounds through knowledge and inventiveness, thus turning cuisine art into a more comprehensive concept, a true “food art”. Throughout the past decades Adrià has filled hundreds of notebooks with concepts, ideas, pictures, collages and drawings of new dishes for El Bulli, the prestigious restaurant of Roses (Gerona, Spain) and platform to shed light on his art.

Such simple creative methods as lists, ingredient tables and cooking methods have been used by Adrià to combine ingredients and conceptualize new cooking ways. The use of drawings to articulate cuisine as a product and concept is an indicative of a singular and unique creative model.

All in all, Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity outlines the origins of intellectual and philosophic ideas promoted by the most innovative chef of the world, a creator that has changed the way to understand contemporary gastronomy.

Source: The Drawing Center