"If his cooking is close to art, then Mr. Adrià is close enough to being an artist to merit the exuberant, engrossing overview of the graphic side of his work at the Drawing Center." Those were The New York Times’ Roberta Smith’s words when reviewing our show featuring the work of Ferran Adrià, arguably the most important avant-garde chef of the 21st Century, and leader of the iiconic restaurant in Catalonia El Bulli. The exhibition was appropriately named Notes on Creativity as it emphasized the role of drawing in Adrià’s quest to understand the creative process.
We presented numerous examples of drawings, diagrams, notes, notebooks, pictograms and prototypes by Adrià and his various collaborators: the chefs Albert Adrià (his brother) and Oriol Castro, the graphic designer Marta Méndez Blaya and the industrial designer Luki Huber. There was also an installation made of 247 plasticine food models fashioned by the El Bulli team. All of these works came from his restaurant that defied culinary conventions, a place where Adrià encouraged his team to deconstruct the cooking process. El Bulli closed for six months each year, and this is when Adrià and his team relocated to a workshop in Barcelona and used drawing extensively to articulate cuisine in a conceptual manner that came of creative thinking.
In 2011, and after more than two decades, 1846 new dishes developed and over 500,000 documents created as part of this creative process, Adrià permanently closed El Bulli. Our exhibition, three years later, served as a record on how Adrià pushed culinary boundaries in order to transform the art of cooking into an art of food and sensorial exploration.
Ferran Adrià, Plating Diagram, CA 2000-2004
Ferran Adrià, El Bulli Kitchen, Roses, Spain
Ferran Adrià, Food DNA Diagram, 2003
