October 25, 2009 – November 29, 2009

Opening reception: November 1, 4 - 7 p.m.

The Soup Show

Adam Niklewicz

The Soup Show celebrates soup, this universal nourishment, that sustains our civilizations and keeps our home fires burning and our pot cooking simmering on the stove. Given Adam Niklewicz’s strange and penetrating imagination, this gallery-wide installation in four parts takes soup to regions where soup should not dwell. A large sphere, surrounded by four chairs, is prettily set with cutlery, plates and napkins – service for four, as it would look on any round table, except no one can eat off it. On top of the sphere balances a soup tureen, and suddenly the notion of a cozy dinner becomes an impossibility and a reminder of the dysfunctioning dinners we have all participated in.

My Dinner with Marian, the artist’s last dinner with Marian Griffiths, the retired director of the Sculpture Center, who died in 2008, becomes a poignant installation of puzzling objects. Her postcard, thanking him for the dinner, is displayed and mentions both Beckett and Havel. The phone book to perhaps provide extra height for a short person, the pots on the chairs, the lids on the floor, the whole set-up makes for an unlikely dinner.

For Adam Niklewicz, who grew up in Poland, the ever-present presence of censorship is exemplified by the scissors that lie next to the plate, in the place where the soup spoon should be.

Adam Niklewicz’s idiosyncratic way of seeing the world and of interpreting everyday actions, shows the viewer extraordinary processes, such as his Monument to Borscht. With elegant simplicity he explains the journey of a spoon of soup from the plate to the diner’s mouth.

Exhibition Brochure (PDF)