A Taste for Art
Gaggenau’s latest experiential dinner was a celebration of creativity in Dubai
For centuries, food has been both a medium and an inspiration in art. Picture Italian master painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 1590 portraits of noblemen bedecked in fresh produce or Jackson Pollock, whose passion for baking and hosting dinner parties ran as deep as his love for spla ering paint on canvas. For a more recent cohort, food fuels creativity, channeling it into unexpected collaborations and outlets: L.A.-based David Allen Burns and Austin Young create immaculately layered digital montages, for example, and the Lazy Mom duo, Josie Keefe and Phyllis Ma, are known for their tongue-incheek use of ingredients in installation art.
In Dubai, Gaggenau, the German brand synonymous with luxurious and high-performance home appliances, is fashioning its own expression of food as a creative medium with a series of artful dinners titled Blank Canvas. Its latest iteration, at the Leila Heller Gallery at Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, brought together the genius of culinary wizard chef Hadrien Villedieu and Kaveh Ahangar, a Dubai-based artist of Iranian heritage, who a er 10 years in the luxury retail industry, decided to pursue his passion for the arts.
Villedieu’s inventive creations have wowed guests at Dubai’s artistic dining venue Inked for years. His eye for detail, the ability to transform ordinary ingredients into something truly exceptional and passion for beautifully presented dishes make him an artist in his own right. At the Gaggenau evening, his dishes complemented Ahangar’s bright and bold art – a style the artist developed during time spent in the Amazon forest – inspired by the sacred geometry found in nature.
Guests were welcomed into a white-box space where an elegantly presented dinner table held court, with a series of monumental, asymmetric blocks staged at its side. With each course, Ahangar turned a block to reveal a large work of art. By the end of the evening, this all-white gallery had been transformed with vibrant colours and shapes. Like a jigsaw puzzle, and indeed like ingredients in a dish, the blocks ed into each other and an abstract mural emerged. gaggenau.com