The relationship between visual art and gastronomy, though often presented as a contemporary discovery, is in fact one of the oldest, quietest conversations in human culture, a dialogue that began long before we had the language to describe it. For centuries, these two worlds developed in parallel: the studio and the kitchen, the canvas and the plate, the sculptor’s hand and the chef’s. Yet as the borders of creativity have dissolved in the last decades, the convergence of these practices has become impossible to ignore. Across the world, from Barcelona to Tokyo, New York to Istanbul, food has become a medium, a performance, a conceptual tool, while the visual arts have grown ever more attuned to the sensory and the ephemeral. What was once dismissed as mere sustenance is now positioned at the heart of aesthetic experience and what was once bound to museums and academies has learned to breathe through taste, smell and ritual.
This evolution did not occur suddenly. Its lineage stretches back to antiquity, where Roman banquets choreographed spectacle, color and excess with the meticulousness of a theatrical production. Apicius’ famous recipes, often treated as practical manuals, also read like aesthetic treatises – concerned with proportion, harmony and sensory impact. Medieval Islamic courts, with their jewel-toned syrups, rose-scented confections, saffron-stained rice and architectural displays of fruit and pastry, transformed food into a decorative language echoing the geometries of tilework and calligraphy. The Ottomans continued this interplay with striking sophistication: The palace kitchen of Topkapı was itself a center of artistic production, where cooks, confectioners and carvers created ephemeral sculptures of sugar, rice and marzipan that paralleled the ornate craftsmanship of the empire’s textiles, ceramics and metalwork.
By the Renaissance, the connection between food and the plastic arts had become unmistakable. Banquets served by the Medici, the Farnese or the Gonzaga families often featured elaborate edible sculptures resembling mythological frescoes. Bartolomeo Scappi’s six-volume cookbook from 1570 was illustrated with the same precision found in architectural treatises, proof that the visual presentation of food had become inseparable from its cultural value. But even then, despite the artistry, gastronomy was never granted the same conceptual agency as painting or sculpture.
The breach in this hierarchy began in the 19th century with Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose Physiology of Taste proposed that eating, too, was an intellectual and aesthetic act. But the true rupture came with the avant-garde. The Futurists, in their 1932 Manifesto of “futurist cooking,” demanded that food reject tradition, embrace multisensory provocation and become a site of invention. Their proposals, tactile dinners, aromatic compositions and edible sculptures – feel startlingly contemporary, as if written for the experimental restaurants of today. The idea that a meal could be an artwork, or that the act of eating could be a performance, took root and never vanished.
The 20th and early 21st centuries transformed gastronomy into a discipline that mirrored the conceptual daring of contemporary art. Ferran Adria’s work at El Bulli, Grant Achatz’s edible performances at Alinea, and Massimo Bottura’s emotional, ironic, self-referential plates at Osteria Francescana dissolved the boundaries between kitchen and studio. Adria’s invitation to Documenta (13) in 2012 crystallized this shift: El Bulli was positioned not as a restaurant but as a site of artistic research, a laboratory of form, perception, memory and transformation. Suddenly, the chef could be an artist and the restaurant an exhibition space.
What makes this convergence so potent is the shared language between the two disciplines. Both rely on material, viscous, temperamental and alive. Both depend on gesture, the intuitive stroke of a brush or the decisive cut of a knife. Both are animated by time: a dish that expires in minutes, a sculpture that aspires to permanence and contemporary art practices that occupy the fleeting, the performative, the perishable. Memory is their common currency. As Ferran Adria often states, creativity is impossible without memory; the same could be said of any painter reconstructing a childhood landscape or any chef reimagining a flavor from the past.
This merging of concerns explains the explosion of collaborations we see today. Artists work with edible materials, treating chocolate, bread, or sugar the way others use wax or clay. Chefs draw from art history to compose dishes inspired by Kandinsky’s geometry, Rothko’s fields of color, Miro’s whimsical biomorphism, or Anselm Kiefer’s monumental textures. Museums commission chefs to interpret artworks as menus and restaurants adopt the dramaturgy of galleries and performance spaces. The boundaries have blurred so thoroughly that they often no longer exist.
Türkiye, too, has become a stage for this synthesis. Over the past decade, a generation of chefs has positioned Istanbul as a global center for gastronomic creativity, one that draws deeply from the visual arts. Mehmet Gürs, with his pioneering work at Mikla, brought an unexpectedly artistic sensibility to Anatolian ingredients – presenting them with the quiet minimalism of Scandinavian painting while grounding them in the textures and rhythms of Anatolian landscapes. His compositions often resemble naturalistic still lifes: stark, elemental and deeply place-specific. Maksut Aşkar, through Neolokal, has gone even further, collaborating directly with contemporary artists, ceramicists, textile designers and illustrators. The restaurant’s tableware, crafted by Turkish artisans, functions as an aesthetic ecosystem; its dishes draw from the visual vocabulary of Istanbul itself – its domes, its patinas, its Byzantine mosaics, its Ottoman miniatures, its street textures. Aşkar’s approach could be described as edible heritage preservation: a marriage of concept, form, memory and politics.
Similarly, the now-legendary Alancha projects conceptualized food as a philosophical inquiry, drawing from Anatolian mythologies in ways reminiscent of contemporary installation art. Even beyond fine dining, figures such as Didem Şenol have brought an artistic, almost painterly sensitivity to seasonal produce and color, shaping Istanbul’s modern gastronomic culture through an aesthetic language grounded in simplicity and authenticity.
While chefs move toward art, artists move toward food. Janine Antoni uses chocolate and lard as sculptural media, questioning desire and consumption. Marije Vogelzang calls herself an “eating designer,” crafting participatory installations in which food becomes a conduit for memory and intimacy. Anicka Yi merges fragrance, biology, and edible substances into futuristic sensory environments that challenge the hierarchy of the senses. In Türkiye, artists such as Ahmet Öğüt, CANAN and Nevin Aladağ have explored themes of domesticity, labor and ritual – areas inseparable from the politics of nourishment. Even the performative dinners organized by contemporary art spaces in Istanbul, often involving chefs, mixology, sculpture and sound, increasingly resemble site-specific artworks more than social events.
Underlying all of this is a philosophical shift: The sensory hierarchy that privileged vision above all else has been dismantled. Scholars such as Carolyn Korsmeyer, Emily Brady and Tim Ingold argue that aesthetics must include taste, smell and touch, which shape emotional and embodied experiences in ways the eye alone cannot. Neurogastronomy reveals that flavor is not a chemical fact but a neural fiction – constructed by memory, expectation and imagination. A chef, then, is not simply a cook but a choreographer of perception. A contemporary artwork, likewise, is no longer confined to sight; it may envelop the visitor in scent, sound, atmosphere, or ritual.
This collapsing of disciplinary borders has produced some of the most iconic creative projects of the last decades. Grant Achatz’s edible balloons at Alinea; the Roca brothers’ collaborations with the Miro Foundation; Noma’s foraging-driven compositions, which resemble land art in miniature; Mirazur’s color-based seasonal menus; Tate Modern’s art-inspired dinners; Molde Atelier in Norway, where ceramics and cooking cohabitate; and in Türkiye, projects such as Neolokal’s seasonal installations, the Salt Galata gastronomic events, and artist-led dining performances emerging from İstanbul’s independent art scene.
What binds these projects together is a shared ambition: to transform nourishment into narrative, to convert ritual into meaning, to treat eating as an aesthetic encounter with the world. They reflect a culture in which creativity has become profoundly interdisciplinary. The visual arts have moved toward the sensory and the social; gastronomy has moved toward the conceptual and the symbolic. Both fields ask questions about identity, belonging, sustainability, heritage and the body. Both are concerned with memory, its construction, its erosion and its political weight. Both are alive to transformation.
The act of eating has always remained one of the most immediate and irreplaceable human experiences. When that experience intersects with art, when a meal becomes a form of contemplation, when a dish becomes a story, when a restaurant becomes a site of affect or critique, something rare occurs: the senses converge, the boundaries between disciplines dissolve, and meaning becomes edible. The intersection of gastronomy and visual art reminds us that creativity does not belong to a medium; it belongs to a way of being in the world. And in that space between taste and vision, body and imagination, new languages are continually being written.
