Story of a Kitchen (Vanessa Sorrentino, 2010)

Monika Wolf was born in Essen, Germany. She started her research with the association  ‘Arte da mangiare’ (‘Art to Eat’) in 2002. Indeed, one would like to eat some of her works, capable as they are of stimulating all the senses. The sensuality of the painting in fact accommodates small grafts of organic materials such as spices and other food pleasures.
With the exhibition History of a Kitchen (Chiostro dei Glicini/ Società Umanitaria / Milan / November 2010) Monika Wolf takes us into the most intimate space of the home, where life is renewed and reproduced thanks to the simple and ancestral gesture of food preparation. An environment traditionally inhabited by women, historically slaves and, all in all, masters of the domestic hearth. And fire, as we know, was the element around which the whole house was centred. The part for the whole, the fire, the fireplace – and thus the more modern gas cookers and cookers – condense the image of the home in fairy tales. And it is precisely The Hearth that is the title of the installation consisting of the 1940s kitchen furniture that belonged to his mother and a cooker. And together a small doll’s kitchen and the lebkuchenherd (toy cooker made of sweets), the faithful reproduction in miniature of the female universe. A toy also intended in childhood games for future mothers, sisters and wives who will have to take care of their loved ones.
A destiny marked out for generations, the kitchen is the place where a practice shrouded in a magical aura is performed, that of preparing and cooking food. Food is nourishment that assimilated becomes a body, and in this it expresses its strength, its power. A traditionally feminine power. As in an alchemic operation, food is first prepared by women’s hands and then transformed by fire. Then broken down into molecules by our bodies, it becomes flesh and blood.
This artist’s research process insinuates itself into the folds of her own family history, because food is above all memory. Brief notes in the margins of recipes found in her mother’s house testify to the passage of knowledge from one generation to the next, from grandmother to mother, from mother to daughter. A matrilineal history, the result of Monika’s research into ancient manuscripts handed down by her family, ranging from the 1930s to the present day. Monika rewrites these recipes in her paintings with her left hand, thus establishing a direct relationship with the unconscious, without the interference of reason. A gesture that allows her to get in touch with the deepest aspects of the psyche, with naturalness and instinct. A return to the mother, to the recipes and symbols of childhood. (…)

Vanessa Sorrentino, for her blog “Stanze sensibili” (17 November 2010)  See the blog ‣

Watch: Monika Wolf, Story of a Kitchen (2010) ‣