Les Dîners de Gala
October 16 – December 18, 2025
Main Projects, Richmond, VA
In 1973, Salvador Dalí published Les Dîners de Gala, an extravagant cookbook that transformed dining into surrealist theater. Across twelve chapters and 136 recipes, Dalí fused culinary excess with eroticism, transforming appetite into allegory. “If you are a disciple of the calorie-counters,” he warned in the preface, “close this book at once.” With recipes sourced from Paris’s most storied restaurants and embellished with his own feverish illustrations, Dalí elevated food into performance - decadent, grotesque, and unashamedly carnal.
At Main Projects, Les Dîners de Gala becomes a point of departure for six artists who revisit Dalí’s banquet through contemporary appetites and anxieties. Here, the table becomes a stage for consumption and decay, fantasy and restraint, where pleasure curdles into something stranger.
Abbi Kenny approaches the still life as performance. In Fishy Fish, Fishes—Fruits of the Sea, she stages an abundant table alive with movement and repetition that teeters between delight and deluge. In But Is It With the Pistachios?, she reimagines a mortadella slice as both pattern and portal—a tactile meditation on taste and transformation.
Danielle Fretwell’s diptych Revival and Gilded Hosts extend the tradition of vanitas painting into a contemporary language of concealment. Her works veil and reveal the sumptuous surfaces of the still life, evoking both desire and restraint—the decadent made devotional.
Marc Dennis’s Sanctuary stages an uncanny memento mori: a tableau of rotting fruit and glossy insects rendered with hyperreal precision. What begins as a feast of color and texture decays into a meditation on time, entropy, and the thin line between beauty and repulsion.
In Stove, Marc Librizzi finds the surreal in domestic ritual. A stainless steel pot sits atop a gas flame that flickers into human silhouettes, hand in hand—a quiet vision of communion and danger, where sustenance becomes myth.
Hannah Levy’s untitled wall work, composed of nickel-plated steel and flesh-toned silicone, transforms a simple hook into a biomorphic gesture—half vegetable, half body. Taut and sensual, it distills Dalí’s appetite for the uncanny into sculptural form.
Finally, Laird Gough’s Three Eggs returns to one of surrealism’s primal symbols: the egg as vessel of birth and vision. Here, a single blue eye gazes outward from its shell, collapsing the act of looking and being looked at into one.
Together, these works channel Dalí’s banquet of excess into a contemporary register—one shaped by desire and disgust, luxury and loss. Les Dîners de Gala invites us to linger at the edge of appetite, where taste becomes a form of imagination, and beauty always comes with a bite.
