In Fishy Fish, Fishes—Fruits of the Sea, Abbi Kenny transforms the act of dining into a theatrical tableau. Thinking about repetition, performance, and consumption, she centered her composition around the fish—a self-contained form that can be eaten whole, both simple and complex. Drawing inspiration from the extravagant imagery of Salvador Dalí’s Les Dîners de Gala, Kenny amplifies this sense of visual and sensory excess, asking: how many fish can appear at once, and in how many forms?

To construct the scene, she collected objects including the central lobster, fish plates, and a patterned tablecloth, staged and photographed her arrangement over one hundred times, and digitally stitched the images into a fractured photocollage. The resulting painting translates that layered instability through her signature material alchemy—acrylic, oil, mica, pumice gel, and crushed mineral pigments shimmering between illusion and surface.

Merging humor and devotion, Fishy Fish, Fishes—Fruits of the Sea celebrates the ritual of eating as a performance of abundance, where food, form, and fantasy converge.