Eliana Willis

This December, famed Spanish artist Diego Velázquez’s Queen Mariana of Austria (1652–53) will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California for the first time in over 30 years. This will mark the painting’s West Coast debut and it will be a focal point of the exhibition titled “Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado.”
Prior to coming to the Norton Simon, the masterpiece has only been on view once before in the U.S. during a 1989 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The painting is part of a larger exhibition, organized by the museum’s chief curator Emily Talbot and associate curator Maggie Bell, which will feature other artists who were also collected by the Habsburg court. Additional works by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán, Guido Reni, and Peter Paul Rubens, among others, will also be on display, giving viewers a deeper understanding of 17th-century Spanish painting. 
“We were delighted when our colleagues at the Museo del Prado suggested Queen Mariana of Austria as the first loan from the Spanish national collection to the Norton Simon Museum. We have great paintings by 17th-century Spanish artists in our collection, but there are no works by Velázquez at the Norton Simon Museum or at any institution on the West Coast,” said Talbot.  “Our display contextualizes Velázquez’s extraordinary career by presenting him in the company of artists that he knew and admired, while highlighting the role that Mariana herself played in her own visual representation.”
The painting itself, which is nearly life-sized, depicts an 18-year-old Queen Mariana following the birth of her son with King Philip IV. Within it, the young queen can be seen in typical Spanish style of that era wearing an exquisite black and silver dress complimented by a guardainfante—an underskirt made up of hoops that expanded the width of a skirt and left the back flat, a common trend in 17th- and 18th-century women’s fashion. The work features rich hues of black and reds and ornate details such as the embroidery on the young queen’s dress and her ornate jewelry. 
Portrait of Diego Rodriguez de Sila y Velázquez (ca. 1640). Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
Velázquez is one of the most famous painters to emerge from Spain during the 17th century. In fact, by 1623, at the age of 24, he had already established himself as the court painter to Philip IV in Madrid. As a result, he would go on to spend the next 40 years creating works centered on royal family—most notably Las Meninas (ca. 1656), starring Philip’s only child, Margarita. 
Completed in the summer of 1651, Queen Mariana of Austria, is considered to be one of Velázquez’s most important works of art. Following an extended period abroad in Rome and upon his return to Madrid, this was his first major commission of that time, and this subject in particular would come to mark a new period in Velázquez’s work. Following the completion of this work, Velázquez would go on to depict female subjects and children in the last half of his artistic career. 
Signed works by Velázquez are increasingly rare, and today only a handful of them exist within U.S. museums. The Prado’s collection, on the other hand, comprises 48 paintings by Velázquez—an astonishing 40 percent of the artist’s total body of work. Queen Mariana is on loan to the Norton Simon as part of an ongoing exchange between the museums, which began earlier this year when Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) traveled to Madrid.
“Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado” will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd. at Orange Grove Boulevard, Pasadena, California, December 13, 2024–March 24, 2025. More

In the mid-2000s, young people on both sides of the Atlantic were swept up in a subculture of melancholy. Its driving force was bands with names like Bring Me the Horizon, My Chemical Romance, and Bury Tomorrow, guitar-led groups whose open-hearted lyrics gave the movement its name: emo, short for emotional.
Fair or not, the emo scene’s reputation was of mop-haired teenagers who were greatly aggrieved with the perceived ills of suburban life. To be sure, there’s nothing revolutionary about a new generation expressing its dismay with state of the world. But, in many ways, the emo scene straddled the past and the future like none before.
A scrapbook of emo images sent in by a fan for the Barbican exhibition. Photo courtesy Andrew Buckingham.
Its sound was a watered-down rehash of 1990s grunge and hardcore, its ethos took something from the DIY spirit of punk, and elements of its fashion winked at Victorian dress. At the same time, emo emerged at the dawn of a new millennium and its tools of expression were online and digital. Fans met online as well as in the mosh pit and took music with them on MP3 players and iPods.
A display case featuring items from the era’s popular bands. Photo courtesy Andrew Buckingham
This is the subject of “I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective,” an exhibition stationed inside the Barbican Music Library and organized in collaboration with the Museum of Youth Culture. The show name is the title of an early My Chemical Romance song—here’s an angsty sample: “You wear me out / What will it take to show you / That it’s not the life it seems? / I’m not okay.”
The exhibition focuses on the years 2004 to 2009 and across a series of wall panels and glass cases, we encounter a movement that seems at once ever-present and long disappeared. The selfie is here, only shot into mirrors and oftentimes with a digital camera. The mobile phones are of the flip and slide varieties. There are obsolete CDs released by bands that remain on tour today and ticket stubs marked with names of venues that no longer exist.
Many elements of emo culture have entered the mainstream. Photo: courtesy The show’s name is taken from a 2004 My Chemical Romance song. Photo: courtesy Jamie Brett.
“Emo is often seen as a lost subculture due to its transatlantic nature and the way so many parts of its more radical styles and sounds became assimilated with pop culture,” Jamie Brett, the show’s curator said via email. “They were perhaps one of the last subcultures still linked to physical space, with one foot in real life and one foot online.”
It may only be 15 years since peak-emo, but many of the digital platforms used by fans have diminished or disappeared (the likes of Bebo, Myspace, Livejournal). Curating “I’m Not Okay” meant trying to recover a culture that had been wiped from servers, deleted from the internet, lost from abandoned phones. The Museum of Youth Culture, which is archiving and exhibiting 100 years of youth culture history from the 1920s, put out a call and had received more than 1,300 submissions within two weeks.
The Museum of Youth Culture’s open call for fan submissions. Courtesy of the Barbican.
These form the bulk of the exhibits on show at the Barbican. There are hand-made patches and t-shirts, sketchbooks with drawings shared on the early platform DeviantArt, bathroom selfies, personal diaries, magazines, and personal testimonies. Together they create a vivid tableaux of youth culture in the first decade of the 21st century, a world of heavy eyeliner, ratty converse, and studded belts.
Elements of emo have been swallowed up by mainstream culture (think Avril Lavigne, skinny jeans, choker necklaces), but the emos are still kicking. “My younger emo self circa 2007,” wrote one contributor, Rachel Morgan, under a selfie shot on a Sony Ericsson. “Now I’m an elder emo still stuck in that phase. The big eyeliner and even bigger hair have gone and I can see out of both eyes now.”
“I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective” is on view at the Barbican Music Library at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, through January 15, 2025. More

Celebrating 60 years since Giorgio Morandi’s death, the Galleria Mattia De Luca has brought to New York a stunning exhibition of 60 works by the Italian painter and printmaker. Surprisingly, Morandi has not had a major show in the city since 2008 when the Met held a retrospective of his work. More lauded in Europe than in the United States, his oeuvre is now given just the right venue, in a 19th century townhouse on East 63rd Street off Fifth Avenue.
Newly renovated by curator and dealer Mattia De Luca, the wooden floors and panels, white walls, and brick fireplaces, with large inviting windows, make for the perfect setting for Morandi’s small paintings. Here you can feel what it would be like to have a Morandi hanging on your own walls, which is where his work belongs. Unfortunately, most of Morandi’s work is in private hands or in museums, rarely coming up for auction. “Owners are attached to the work and you rarely see any Morandi for sale, only minor works,” Mattia said. This exhibit is a rare opportunity to be up close to the deep beauty.
Along with Marilena Pasquali, founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center in Bologna, they were able to procure 27 paintings. In the spring of 2022, “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended I” opened at the Galleria Mattia De Luca’s Rome headquarters. “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II,” in New York, is also curated by Mattia and Pasquali and will run through November 27, 2024. “A number of paintings have never been shown in New York,” Mattea said. “We are thrilled to be showing 48 paintings, five etchings, four watercolors, and some drawings.”
Installation view by Nicholas Knight
Love at First Sight
Speaking with Mattia on a tour through the exhibit, it is clear he is passionate about the artist and devoted to Morandi’s legacy. He pointed out nuances in the work that often go unnoticed. “Morandi’s signature on each painting is unique and specific. It is never casual, never random,” he said. “His signature is original to each work.”
In Fernado Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet from 1982, he writes: “The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.” This is an apt description of Morandi’s painting; So many times during our conversation talking about the work, Mattia said that “it’s hard to put [the work] into words.” That is one of the beauties and power of Morandi’s pictorial universe—the otherness. Certainly there is tenderness, devotion, rigor, skill. The more you stand still in front of a Morandi, the more you can sense this otherness.
Mattia saw his first Morandi when his parents took him to a museum when he was 13. “I fell in love. Ever since, I try to see every exhibition that shows his work. I collect the catalogs and read everything I can about him.” In 2020, lockdown was very strict in Italy. “For three months, we couldn’t go out. It was tough. At that time, I felt Morandi was more relevant than ever—this suspended feeling of his work. The quiet. So I came up with the idea of putting on a Morandi show and began researching where the works were.” He contacted museums and collectors and found out how difficult it was to convince them to lend the work for an exhibition.
Giorgio Morandi Natura morta (V. 907) signed: “Morandi” (lower center). Executed in 1954 (undated)
An Artist’s Artist
Whether it is one Morandi’s signature still lifes, a landscape or etching, to spend time looking at the work offers many rewards. His work compels you to stop and be still, which is one of the allures. Mattia commented that “Morandi is an artist’s artist,” and you can understand why. One wants to stare long at the visible brushstrokes in flat white and grey, the warm pastels of brick, ochre, rose, the way he animates the objects as if they each have a distinct personality, and his ability to capture the streets of Bologna where he walked every day as well as the surrounding Emilian hillside.
Philip Guston, Vija Clemins, Frank Gehry, Wayne Thiebaud, Edmund de Waal, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Fellini, Don DeLillo, all were influenced and inspired by the artist. “What makes Morandi so great is his ability to transfer emotions into objects, bringing them to life,” said Mattia. “In his early work, he was experimenting, more technical. As you move through the exhibit into his later work and toward the end of his life, you can feel his soul. In the last room, his 1960 still life with the bright white bottle in the center strongly holds the other objects. He was so grounded in his work.”
Painter Giorgio Morandi in his flat in Bologna. Photography. 1958. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Der Maler Giorgio Morandi in seiner Wohnung in Bologna. Photographie. 1958.]From Bologna to the White House
The art historian, Roberto Longhi, described him as “arguably the greatest Italian painter of the 20th century.” Obama chose two oil paintings when he was president in 2009 by Morandi, now part of the White House Collection. Umberto Eco said, “Morandi reaches the peak of his spirituality as a poet of matter.”
Born in Bologna in 1890, Morandi lived through two world wars. Early in his life he traveled in Europe to study many great paintings. His hero was Cezanne. With his family, he moved to Bologna when he was 20, where he lived for the rest of his life. At 40, he became professor of etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna where he once was a student, later still becoming chair of printmaking until 1956. When he was 67, he won the Grand Prize for painting at the São Paulo Biennale, beating out Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollock. He died in the home where he lived and worked for most of his life, just shy of his 74th birthday.
Working in a nine square-meter studio with a single bed, Morandi, standing six foot four, built a high table so he could see his objects at eye level. He often ground his pigments and stretched the canvases, and worked obsessively on his paintings. Like Giacometti, he never cleaned his studio. Over the 40 years, Morandi’s subjects accumulated layers of dust: bottles, old pitchers, a lemon squeezer, café latte bowls, tin boxes, quaint vases.
Installation view by Nicholas Knight
He was also a master printmaker. “In tones of black and grey, in his mark making, the etchings, his rigour is evident,” Mattia said. “In the watercolours you can clearly see his command of negative space. The simple outlines in the drawings are like paintings, with light coming through.”
On the wall of the winding staircase his flower paintings are on view; He often used paper roses for his subject. “Morandi was never attached to his work. He never sold any of his flower paintings. They were all gifts to friends because he felt they were too intimate.”
Giorgio Morandi Natura morta (V. 1188) signed: “Morandi” (lower left). Executed in 1960 (undated)
While the first floor of the town house is dedicated to his early works, on the second floor are paintings from the 1950s up to 1964, the year he died. “His still lifes are architectural. Geometric planes. Rectangles within rectangles within rectangles, layered. You can see his hand working. In one, the white bottle is strong and precise while the others are softly leaning into her.” In the sixth room, the last one in the exhibition, his strokes become looser, the colors more blurred, as if he is fading away.
It’s as if in the repetition of painting the ordinary, Morandi uncovered what was inside; it is that which haunts you, compelling you to return. There is always more to see if you open yourself to go beyond looking and allow the work to penetrate. That otherness that typifies his work only reveals itself through vulnerability, opening yourself up, and coming to the work without preconceptions. These works are an abstraction of reality. “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II” affords us the opportunity to intimately engage with Morandi’s gift of perception. He painted worlds.
“Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II” is on view Galerie Mattia de Luca. More

As of this month, four otherworldly sculptures by South Korea’s most infamous artist watch over Fifth Avenue from the niches along the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s forward-facing exterior, marking the first major U.S. showcase by Lee Bul in over 20 years. Their silhouettes both contradict and complement the Met’s limestone Beaux-Arts facade, enticing viewers to contemplate the catch-22 of progress.
“I can’t really speak for other institutions,” said Lesley Ma, the Met’s first-ever curator of modern and contemporary Asian art, who helped oversee Lee’s commission, Long Tail Halo. “But the reason that we chose her is that she’s one of the most celebrated sculptors of her generation.”
“Later, I found out that she knew about the facade commission,” Ma added, “and was hoping that she would be invited one day.”
The Met, featuring four new sculptures by Lee Bul. Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Lee, 60, achieved notoriety during her twenties for performances like Sorry for Suffering – You think I’m a puppy on a picnic (ca. 1980s–90s) and Abortion (1989), wherein she traipsed Seoul in a tentacled costume and hung from the ceiling of Dongsoong Art Center discussing her own terminated pregnancy, respectively. The latter stunt only concluded after attendees insisted Lee be taken down from her harness, which was causing her obvious pain.
From there, Lee moved into sculptures, like Majestic Splendor—a frequently re-staged installation of bagged fish that filled the MoMA with a putrid odor in 1997 debut—and her Cyborgs of the same decade, which explored the tensions between people and technology through partial, pristine, sexy half robots made from silicone, polyurethane, and paint.
Lee Bul, CTCS #1 (2024). Photo by Eugenia BurnettTinsley. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“In the mid 2010s she kind of shifted her perspective into the larger narration of history,” Ma noted. Lee’s sculptures exploded into her now-recognizable style of meticulous, many-faceted amalgamations. Her “Secret Sharer” series, which translates the shape of man’s cross-cultural best friend through this approach, debuted at her 2011 retrospective in Tokyo. Canines surface twice in her latest commission for the Met, too.
Long Tail Halo is the fifth installment in the Museum’s facade series, which Wangechi Mutu inaugurated in 2019. Lee’s edition is the first since auto company Genesis started sponsoring it. Much like Mutu and British-Guyanaese artist Hew Locke, Lee drew inspiration directly from the Met’s collection for her turn in the niches. But, instead of putting a new spin on the past or interrogating the present, Lee looks towards the future.
Lee Bul, The Secret Sharer II (2024). Photo by Eugenia BurnettTinsley. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Two different shapes appear here: two proud humanoid forms, and two crouching canines. The taller figures flank the Met’s doors, while the dazzling dogs perch on the outskirts, purging crystals into the fountains—a serendipitous alignment that even Lee didn’t foresee, according to Ma.
All four sculptures tessellate mesmerizing planes of EVA or polycarbonate parts over steel armatures. Although the niches do offer a bit of protection from the elements, it helps that Lee has built a practice off such durable, industrial materials. And while scores of artists typically send the designs for their public artworks out for fabrication, Lee handcrafted these sculptures with the help of about a dozen assistants in her Seoul studio, piecing them together atop underlying skeletons of woven stainless steel that resemble artworks in their own right, if only viewers could see them.
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, conceived in 1913, cast in 1972. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.
During the day and a half-long Met visit that kickstarted Lee’s conceptualization, she was struck by the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger, as well as Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist bronze sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). A show of Louise Bourgeois’s oft-overlooked paintings depicting human forms arising from architectures—much like Lee blends the figurative with the abstract, and the human with the non human—also struck her.
These disparate artistic influences clearly manifest amongst Long Tail Halo. Mixed together, though, they blend into a classical beauty that, at times, echoes the likes of Lady Liberty.
Long Tail Halo encompasses Lee’s fortes—her command over material, her taste for allure, and her ability to toe the line between utopia and dystopia. Their striking appearance invites guests and pedestrians alike to slow down, take a closer look, and perhaps even pause for a second thought, before returning to progress’s inexorable pull.
“Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave, New York, through May 27, 2025. More

Few artists have a biography as varied as Nathan Myhrvold. The photographer, scientist, chef, and author of the award-winning Modernist Cuisine cookbooks opened his first New York City solo show this week inside—appropriately—a delicious Japanese restaurant.
When I asked him to define himself, Myhrvold told me it depended on the context. “I go to dinosaur conferences, and when I’m there, I would describe myself as a paleontologist.
I do research in astronomy and when I go to those things, I am an astronomer. And when I am talking to people at my art galleries or doing an interview like this, I’m an artist.”
Myhrvold, age 65, got a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at New Jersey’s Princeton University and did a postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Hawking. Next, he cofounded a computer start-up that Microsoft purchased in 1986. He worked for the company for 13 years, serving as its first chief technology officer before retiring in 1999.
Now, “Intention and Detail” at the Gallery, a Japanese restaurant and art gallery from chef Hiroki Odo, is Myhrvold’s first formal art exhibition. (He’s shown his photographs at museums before, but at institutions dedicated to science, not art.)
Nathan Myhrvold, Yumepirika, a photo of premium Japanese white rice grown by Mr. Tomo. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
Odo opened his namesake Flatiron District restaurant in late 2018, earning two Michelin stars and an effusive three-star New York Times review. There’s a bar called Hall in front of the kaiseki dining counter, and a speakeasy lounge tucked in back. In 2021, Odo expanded next door with the Gallery, as a means of combining his passion for art and design with his love of the culinary world.
Myhrvold, with his specialty of food photography, was a natural fit for the space—although when the chef reached out about the possibility of a show, he did have some notes.
“Nathan Myhrvold: Intention and Detail” at the Gallery by Odo, New York. Photo by Olive Mirra/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
“He said, ‘I love your photographs, but you don’t have all that much Japanese food or Japanese ingredients.’
So I said, ‘well, I can fix that,’” Myhrvold said.
Already planning a photography trip to Borneo from his home in Seattle, it was easy for Myhrvold to extend a layover in Japan. On the outskirts of Tokyo in Minato, he spent a day documenting the production of mame daifuku, a traditional Japanese dessert of red bean paste wrapped in mochi, made from pounded rice, at Matsushimaya. Myhrvold wanted to celebrate the craft of old-fashioned production processes still in use in Japan, which, despite modernization, boasts many businesses that are hundreds of years old.
“It was fascinating to see them work. There are machines for a couple of things, like pounding the rice, but for almost everything else, they do it all by hand,” he recalled, noting that the trickiest thing about the shoot was simply finding a good vantage point to take photos in the business’s tight, efficiently organized quarters.
Nathan Myhrvold taking one of his frozen-motion photographs of wine. Photo courtesy of the Cooking Lab, LLC.
Back in Seattle, where he runs the Cooking Lab, the culinary research and development lab that self-publishes his books, Myhrvold also took photos under the microscope of typical Japanese ingredients. There are larger-than-life shots of sesame seeds, bonito flakes, shiso leaves, the adzuki beans used to make the mame daifuku filling, and even a special kind of premium rice that sells for $50 a pound.
“I like to literally focus on food, to look at food in microscopic detail, and to show the beauty that’s there that most people don’t even see,” he said, pointing out the different pink and yellow colors that magically emerge when you zoom in on a seemingly black sheet of nori seaweed.
“It turns out shiso leaf is also really beautiful,” Myhrvold added. “The architecture of the leaf has these veins that branch out. But there’s also these little droplets on the underside of the leaves that actually contain the flavor oil that makes shiso what it is, and they look like clear resin and little bits of the jewel amber.”
Nathan Myhrvold, Shiso. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC
In the exhibition, these magnified images are displayed on a monumental scale, printed on archival paper. The result is something more akin to abstract art, with an intriguing, alien-like beauty totally absent from photographs one might take of their brunch order to share on Instagram.
The celebration of these ingredients is amplified when paired with Odo’s cooking, which is about as delicious as you would expect coming out of a two-Michelin-star kitchen. I went to the space to experience both the art and the food, and ordered the tasting menu.
Courses included a jewel box-like tray of sushi, a trio of delicately breaded and fried kushi-age skewers, and an ingenious shabu shabu, in which the guest cooks mushrooms and thin slices of beef themselves in a delicious broth heated over a flame in what appears to be a coffee filter. Any one of the dishes would have been worthy of appearing alongside the art on the gallery walls.
Nathan Myhrvold, Adzuki. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
Myhrvold has been a photographer since childhood, and spent years in the darkroom developing large format film—especially as his day job at Microsoft allowed him to afford more expensive cameras and equipment. And while he was at the tech giant, Myhrvold took a leave of absence to study at culinary school in France. It was an experience that presaged his next act, as an acclaimed cookbook author, focusing on what’s popularly known as molecular gastronomy.
In 2005, he began working on the six-volume, 2,400-page opus that became Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (2011). It won the 2012 James Beard Foundation’s Cookbook of the Year award. Modernist Bread followed in 2017, and Modernist Pizza in 2021. (Next up will be a book on pastry.)
The Modernist Cuisine books. Photo courtesy of the Cooking Lab, LLC.
For each book, Myhrvold not only meticulously tested a multitude of different cutting-edge cooking techniques and the science behind them, but photographed every step of the way. That led to two books specifically focused on his art: Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013) and Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography (2023).
Those stunning images seemed almost magical in their ability to capture the act of cooking in gorgeous detail. Many feature appliances and cookware sliced in half to present a unique cross section view. All were shot with custom-built cameras.
A photo of broccoli from Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (2011). Photo by Nathan Myhrvold, courtesy of the Cooking Lab.
“I build all of the equipment, and to me that is a way of both increasing the technical quality of the photos, but also it’s my homage to the discipline,” Myhrvold said.
Super high shutter speeds and specially-designed robotic rigs allowed him to capture fleeting moments—like sabering open a champagne bottle or spilling a glass of wine—in ultra crisp, high-resolution images.
A photo of wine spilling from Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography (2023). Photo by Nathan Myhrvold, courtesy of the Cooking Lab.
“We’re only just now getting very fast shutter speeds with the latest set of digital cameras—for a long time, the fastest would be a thousandth of a second.
And that’s way too slow.
You get a blur. So my flashes are 160 thousandths of a second,” Myhrvold said.
“We all spill wine.
But it happens so fast you can’t realize how beautiful it is when it occurs. It looks like some crazy glass sculpture from Murano in Venice or from Dale Chihuly or something,” he added.
”It’s amazing-looking, but with our normal human senses we can’t see it.
So these photos are a way in which I can show you a vision of food you haven’t seen before.”
Installation view of “Nathan Myhrvold: Intention and Detail” in the lounge space at the Gallery by Odo, New York. Photo by Olive Mirra/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
Achieving such images—a selection of which are on view in the Odo lounge space—is not without its potential downsides, Myhrvold warned: “When you do these splash shots, you wind up just getting soaked in wine. When you drive home, you better not get stopped by the cops, because they’re going think you’re drunk no matter what you say, because you just reek!”
But while the process might be messy, the results are so beautiful that fans of the cookbooks soon began inquiring about whether prints were for sale. (Myhrvold’s new series of 10 large-format artist proofs is priced at $17,500 each, as is the full set of 12 mame daifuku photos.)
Nathan Myhrvold, Kuromai. A photo of black “Forbidden Rice” taken under a microscope. Photo by Nathan Myhrvold/Modernist Cuisine Gallery LLC.
After his success in self-publishing—the book no publisher dared to take a chance on went on to sell 300,000 copies, despite a $600 price tag—Myhrvold saw no reason not to open his own art gallery as well.
Today, the Modernist Cuisine Gallery has spaces in New Orleans and La Jolla, San Diego, and is looking to expand to Miami. (Outposts in Las Vegas and Myhrvold’s hometown of Seattle have since shuttered.) But the New York show should help bridge the gap between art, science, and the culinary world for an artist, scientist, and chef whose work does just that.
“Nathan Myhrvold: Intention and Detail” is on view at the Gallery by Odo, 17 West 20th Street, New York, New York, September 24–November 3, 2024. More