Kusama on the Plate

What happens when the infinite worlds of Yayoi Kusama enter not only the museum, but also the kitchen? Chef Schilo van Coevorden translates her dots, colours and obsessions at Restaurant Sandberg into an exclusive five-course dinner, for seven evenings only.

For Schilo van Coevorden, a dish is never merely a collection of ingredients. The Amsterdam chef, classically trained in French cuisine but fascinated by Japan and Asia for decades, built a wholly distinctive culinary signature with Taiko in which technique, colour, texture and presentation matter as much as taste. His dishes sometimes resemble compositions: precise, bold and often with an unexpected element. That he admires the work of Yayoi Kusama is therefore unsurprising. The Japanese artist, world-renowned for her polka dots, pumpkins, mirror rooms and hallucinatory installations, turned repetition and obsession into a universe unto itself. What begins with a single dot can expand into a world without visible beginning or end. She worked for more than seventy years across the boundaries of painting, sculpture, fashion, performance and installation, becoming one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That boundless imagination has influenced Van Coevorden. Not only in how he looks at art, but also in how he thinks about taste and presentation: how a single ingredient, form or idea can be examined again and again and ultimately become a complete story. It suits a chef who built his own bridge from classical French cuisine to Asia and combines Japanese precision with local produce and bold flavours.

From infinity room to five courses

From 11 September, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents a major retrospective of Kusama, featuring work from more than seventy years of artistic practice. Paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, fashion and happenings come together in an exhibition where patterns, self-image and especially the idea of infinity recur throughout. Her recent death has given the overview an unexpected character as a posthumous tribute. That exhibition forms the starting point for SANDBERG X SCHILO AN ODE TO KUSAMA: a series of five-course dinners in which Van Coevorden interprets Kusama's world culinarily rather than attempting to recreate it literally. Expect no obligatory dots on every plate, but a play with colour, repetition, form, contrast and surprise. Art that does not hang on a wall but is eaten. The dinner series was moreover already in preparation before Kusama's death. This gave the project an unintended extra dimension: what began as a tribute to a living source of inspiration has now simultaneously become a personal homage.

Sandberg as a stage

A more fitting setting is hard to imagine. Café Restaurant Sandberg, part of Stedelijk Museum, bears the name of Willem Sandberg, the legendary designer, typographer and museum director who led Stedelijk between 1945 and 1963. Sandberg believed that art should not be an elevated world at a distance, but part of the city and everyday life. Experiment and playfulness belonged to that vision. That very idea comes to life here once more: museum, restaurant, chef and artist merge for several evenings.

SANDBERG X SCHILO AN ODE TO KUSAMA is served exclusively on 11, 12, 18, 19, 24, 25 and 26 September. Those who wish not only to view Kusama but, figuratively speaking, to taste her as well, must act quickly.

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