Ferran Adrià Exhibit Coming to NYC & Cleveland in 2014

The US is getting a Ferran Adrià exhibit: Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity will be hosted at New York City's Drawing Center from January 25 – February 28, 2014, after which it will move on to MOCA Cleveland from September 26 - January 18, 2015. Items on display include photographs of the elBulli kitchen, drawings, notes, and other ephemera from the now-shuttered restaurant. The Drawing Center's Brett Littman told the New York Times they were drawn to the archives of Ferran Adrià because of its visual appeal: "Instead of writing recipes like most chefs, Ferran begins by making drawings."

Also on continuous display will be Documenting Documenta, a film about Adrià's participation in art exhibition Documenta 12, and 1846, a film featuring every single dish ever served at elBulli. There will be a conversation on the "DNA of the Culinary Process" (and, it seems, the Bullipedia) between Adrià and Dan Barber on January 23 (buy tickets here). Below, a press release and images from the exhibit.

Grid View

Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity
January 25 – February 28, 2014 Main Gallery, The Lab
Opening Reception: Friday, January 24, 6–8pm

December 2, 2013

New York – The Drawing Center will present Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity, January 25–February 28, 2014, the first major museum exhibition to focus on the visualization and drawing practices of master chef Ferran Adrià. The exhibition will emphasize the role of drawing in Adrià's quest to understand creativity. His complex body of work positions the medium as both a philosophical tool—used to organize and convey knowledge, meaning, and signification-—as well as a physical object—used to synthesize over twenty years of innovation in the kitchen. MOCA Cleveland will host the exhibition September 26, 2014 through January 18, 2015.

Food culture, like any form of culture, requires outliers, and Ferran Adrià is its provocateur. As one of the most important avant-garde chefs of the twenty-first century, Adrià pushes culinary boundaries with knowledge and wit, transforming the art of food into an art form all its own. Hundreds of notebooks have been filled with concepts, ideas, collaged photographs, and loose sketches for new dishes for elBulli. More straight forward creative methods in the form of lists, tables of ingredients, and cooking methods have also been used to synthesize ingredients and conceptualize new ways of cooking. The use of drawing to articulate cuisine (as both product and concept) highlights a creative model that is always in flux and constantly shifting.

Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity will chart the origins of this innovator's intellectual and
philosophical ideas about gastronomy that have forever changed how we understand food. These ideas will be presented as wall graphics, framed prints, and related ephemera. The exterior of a large cube in the center of the Main Gallery will feature large-scale photographic reproductions of elBulli's kitchen during service. A series of vitrines around the cube will display a selection of elBulli notebooks documenting menu development, product taxonomies, and personal notes; architectural drawings and a model of the new elBulli Foundation headquarters; elBulli's plasticine food models; and drawings and prototypes related to elBulli's dishware, utensils, menus, and graphic identity. Inside the cube Adria's "working boards" will lean against large-scale documentary photographs of the elBulli archive in Barcelona. These boards were used in the elBulli atelier to document and organize research, menu development, and photography. The "working boards" at The Drawing Center will include drawings from the 2006 and 2008 elBulli menus, abstract plating drawings and drawings, from Adrià's
Peach Melba project.

The Drawing Center's Lab gallery will screen Documenting Documenta about Adrià's participation in Documenta 12, and will debut 1846, a film produced by The Drawing Center that will feature images of every dish that Adrià served at elBulli.

Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director.

SPECIAL PARTNERSHIP WITH DOM PÉRIGNON
Ferran Adrià shares with Dom Pérignon a perennial story of creative pairings, valuing a similar conception of creativity and a long term running collaboration. Both operate bold commitments in new rituals of tastes and emotions. This led Ferran Adrià to transform gastronomy by reworking ingredients into new forms and combinations and Dom Pérignon's Chef de Cave Richard Geoffroy to revive oenology by meticulously crafting each vintage from a single year's grapes, renewing with each vintage the mysterious balance of Dom Pérignon signature. Through time, their pairings explored harmony as well as surprising and unexpected effects with a perfect rigor and a constant quest for excellence. It is with this adventurous spirit that Dom Pérignon collaborates with artists
from all disciplines.

ABOUT FERRAN ADRIÀ
Ferran Adrià Acosta (b. 1962 in Barcelona, Spain). In April 1984, Adrià joined the team of elBulli in the position of Chef de Partie. By 1987, Adrià began to use ingredients, techniques, and regional influences that reinterpreted "haute cuisine." Until 1993, the Mediterranean-style defined much of the cuisine of elBulli and exerted an important infl
uence on the Catalan and Spanish cuisine of this period. However, beginning in 1990, Adrià incorporated tapas, spoons, skewers, jellies, and savory ice cream—concepts that reached their full expression by 1994. From that time on, three pillars characterized the cuisine of elBulli: continual research of new cooking techniques; an emphasis on the role of the senses in the art of creating and eating; and the sixth sense, that is to say, the role of reason and reflection on the act of eating. Adrià's trademark cuisine was served to the elBulli diner in the form of an extensive tasting menu, which grew to more than forty dishes in the final years of elBulli. Beginning in the late 1980s, Adrià and Juli
established a culinary season that was divided into two parts: six months of service in the restaurant and six months of research and creativity. The latter activity was carried out in different locations until 2000, when elBullitaller was opened in Barcelona. This change marked an evolution in the cuisine of elBulli, leading to the bestowal of three Michelin stars in 1997, and the title of "Best Restaurant in the World" by Restaurant Magazine in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The accolade "Chef of the Decade" was presented to Adrià in 2010 by the same magazine.

In 2011, Adrià decided to close the restaurant to transform it into a foundation. He orchestrated, in accordance with Richard Geoffroy, the ultimate supper at El Bulli matching in a unique experience 50 plates of his creation with 6 rare Dom Pérignon: Dom Pérignon Oenothèque 1973, Dom Pérignon Vintage 2002, Dom Pérignon Oenoth
èque 1996, Dom Pérignon Oenothèque 1969, Dom Pérignon Oenothèque 1976 and Dom Pérign on Oenothèque Rosé 1990. The foundation will open in 2015 and aims to preserve the legacy of elBulli, including its installations and its archive. The original elBulli building in Cala Montjoi will be redesigned by Spanish architect Enric Ruiz Geli, who will create a space that is sustainable, ecological and integrated into the landscape. A permanent exhibition will be staged to present a narrative that outlines the restaurant's history and culinary evolution. In addition, this space will provide facilities for activities related to the process of creativity with a team that will publish its research on the Internet.

Ferran Adrià was the subject of the recent exhibition Ferran Adrià and elBulli at Palau Robert, Barcelona, Spain, in February 2012. He has participated in Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany, in 2007, and was featured in the documentary film El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
(2011). In the fall of 2010 he was a guest lecturer at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He was the recipient of the 2011 Queen Sofia Spanish Institute's gold medal, The San Pellegrino award for best chef of the decade by The Restaurant Magazine in 2010, and recipient of The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) award for best chef in 2009, among other accolades. In 2011, The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià, was published by Phaidon, a follow-up to the internationally acclaimed monograph A Day at elBulli, published in 2008. On March 3, 2014, Phaidon will publish the landmark elBulli 2005-2011, a seven-volume set chronicling every recipe
from the last six years of the restaurant and providing unprecedented insight into the elBulli team's creative process.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Thursday, January 23rd at 7pm at New Museum Auditorium
Tickets: $6 Members, $8 General Public

DNA of the Culinary Process
The New Museum and The Drawing Center will co-host an evening conversation between Ferran Adrià and Dan Barber, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, that will be moderated by Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center. They will premiere and discuss Adrià's new "DNA of the Culinary Process" research project, which for the first time in the history of gastronomy, collects and organizes the products, actions, concepts, and results involved in the cooking process.
Saturday, January 25th at 2pm Brett Littman, curator and Executive Director of The Drawing Center and Ferran Adrià will lead a public walkthrough of the exhibition
Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity.

Thursday, January 30, 6:30–8pm
Eve Meltzer, Associate Professor of Visual Studies at NYU, will read excerpts from her new book, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn, and discuss its relationship to Ferran Adrià's ambitious culinary, systematic, and drawn aspects.

PUBLICATION
To accompany Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity The Drawing Center will produce an extensively illustrated, 200 page edition in the Drawing Papers series, which will feature an interview between Ferran Adrià and Brett Littman and an essay by the artist Richard Hamilton about the relationship of food to contemporary art that first appeared in the book, Food for Thought: Thought for Food (2009), which was published following Adrià's
participation in Documenta 12.

· The Drawing Center [Official Site]
· All Ferran Adrià Coverage on Eater [-E-]