Artist Sculpts a Year's Supply of Food Out of Porcelain

Eerie food sculptures for a good cause are the result of a year's worth of work from Dutch-Israeli artist, Itamar Gilboa.

by Beckett Mufson

May 20, 2015, 3:50pm

Over 8,000 replicas of milk cartons, eggplants, and pepper shakers fill artist Itamar Gilboa's pop-up installation, Food Chain. In a tangible take on the "Quantified Self"—the idea that data can be used to learn more about and improve our daily lives—he tracked everything he ate for 365 days, made molds of the 150 most common products, and cast a supermarket's worth of matte white food sculptures out of porcelain. The result? An impressive visualization of all the food it takes to keep a human being alive for one year.

While the final products may not have the flavor of Lertnert & Sanders' Food Cubes, they sure look tastier than Daniel Arsham's dead tech sculptures, and retain the similar effect of familiar items that are just different enough to be feel uncanny. "All of [the sculptures] have been denuded of their branding," Gilboa explains, which seems to include even the colors Nature gives zucchini, oranges, and garlic cloves.

Gilboa sells the tiny models in the form of a traveling grocery store that pops up at destinations including Dutch Design Week, TEDxEDE, Food Film Festival, and the Nieuw Dakota art space. "A portion of the sales of the artwork will go to organizations working to end world hunger, thereby creating a food chain: what I ate is turned into art, which, when sold, can again become food," Gilboa tells The Creators Project. Ultimately, it's a new installment in Gilboa's foray into the social sculpture practice of Joseph Beuys, alongside a repertoire of video installations and paintings that both explore his own Dutch-Israeli identity and promote social justice and equality.