when art masterpieces inspire healthy and tasty recipes

Take the professionalism and passion of an art critic, Caterina Corni, with the passion for contemporary Indian art, the imagination of an all the rage food blogger, IsaporidiB, and the experience gained in the field of an expert nutritionist, Francesca Guelfi…and lunch is served!

Art lovers who believe in the therapeutic power of art, the most curious and ‘crunchy’ appointment to note down in your diaries from now to the end of March is Il gusto dell’Arte, the current exhibition at the premises of the Boscovich Medical Office in via Settembrini 7 in Milan.

If it is true that “beauty will save the world” as Dostoevsky tells us and “the essential is invisible to the eye” as we like to believe in pursuing the Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s masterpiece, the reproduction of fifty famous works from the Middle Ages to the present time – from Carracci to Manet, from Botero to Matisse to Oldenburg and Sparnaay – will take you on a unique and unrepeatable artistic and gastronomic journey. This is true because alongside works like Still Life with Crustaceans and Shrimps by Matisse

Woman eating a banana by Colombian Fernando Botero

Breakfast in the garden by Giuseppe De Nittis

and Giant BLT

through which the Swedish artist and pop art icon Claes Oldenbourg heavily denounced the unbridled food consumerism in contemporary American society, you can browse through a selection of photographs by famous artists dealing with food.

It is intriguing to see Picasso enjoy a long and sharp spine, what remains of a very tasty roasted fish

or the genius of pop art, Andy Warhol caught tasting a traditional American hamburger

Furthermore, those who wish can take home the recipe created by IsaporidiB in collaboration with Francesca Guelfi hanging next to each reproduction.

And that is still not enough. To make the exhibition even more attractive, there is the location, not the usual exhibition venue inside a museum or a gallery, but the waiting room and the visiting rooms of the Boscovich Medical Office, which has been carrying on for years a cultural program in homage to the combination of art, food, healthy eating and well-being.

Giorgio Gottardi is sure of this, one of the founding partners who explains: “The cultural sensitivity of our studio has brought about the creation of the Associazione Arte e Salute (Art and Health Association) with the aim of enhancing the therapeutic role of art in all its forms. This exhibition represents the crowning of the union between art and health, and suggests guidelines for a good and healthy diet”.

We met the curator Caterina Corni [Fig.7], born in 1979, art critic and curator of exhibitions in Italy and abroad. She has opened the doors of the Milanese Studio for an interview in this zero issue of Dichecibo6 Magazine.

Aim? Discover and bring to the fore curious and original events and exhibitions, sometimes far from the standard circuits but with a high cultural factor and emotional degree.

We are in a medical office: an original location for an exhibition. We follow her along the exhibition itinerary.

“The exhibition is divided into six rooms, each named after a specific moment in everyday life that has to do with food: breakfast, picnic, aperitif, lunch, dinner, to close with the Egg room, an ancestral symbol of life and protagonist of many cosmogonies, which from a food point of view contains a multiplicity of origins (from  hen, quail, ostrich, etc.). After all, the Egg element has always been represented figuratively as evidenced by the Pala di Brera, commissioned to Piero della Francesca in 1472 by Federico di Montefeltro, with a shell and an ostrich egg hanging from it, in the upper part of the painting. The choice of inserting an ostrich egg is not accidental because at the time it was believed that the sun’s rays fertilized it and consequently it was without sin as the Madonna depicted with her Son on her lap”.

How does this show fit into the activities of the Boscovich studio?

“This is the fourth exhibition held here after Tutti pazzi per l’arte ¹(2015), focused on patients with psychiatric problems, Sprigioniamo arte² (2016) focused on prisoners in San Vittore prison, and Non ti scordar di me ³(2017), on the problems that affect old people, with particular attention to Alzheimer’s disease”.

New projects?

“Certainly after this exhibition, we will be able to put other exciting cultural experiences in the pipeline, convinced that beauty, creativity and imagination represent valid support to rediscover one’s own identity and inner harmony”.

INFO: IL Gusto dell’Arte ( Studio Medico Boscovich, via Settembrini 7 – Milano – Tel. 02 6693281 – 67075732 )
Orari: Monday to Friday 9.00-19.30 – Sat 9.00-13.00

FIAMMA DOMESTICI

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[1] All crazy about art
[2] Free art
[3] Don’t forget about me