Main Projects is pleased to present The Tasting Room, Abbi Kenny’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Across these new paintings, shellfish, martini olives, fruit, and ornamental excess accumulate into layered compositions shaped by touch, preparation, and display.
Throughout the exhibition, food appears in states of handling and transformation. Opened shells, fondue forks, serving platters, and carefully arranged foods linger between preparation, ornament, and consumption. Hands remain implied throughout the paintings, even when absent from the image itself. Acts of cooking, arranging, preserving, and serving begin to mirror Kenny’s own material process, where pigments, binders, and additive materials are repeatedly layered, sanded, masked, and transformed.
Kenny approaches painting through a process of construction and accumulation. Working with a collage mindset, she builds compositions gradually from collected fragments: meals she cooks, seafood markets, family recipes, historical cookbooks, internet imagery, and personal archives. Images are gathered over long periods of time before being reconfigured into paintings that feel simultaneously seductive, humorous, and slightly uncanny. As the artist notes, “The images come together through collection and play.”
That same logic extends into Kenny’s material approach to painting. Working with raw pigment and binder, she incorporates materials such as pumice, cellulose, glitter, glass beads, mica, and semi-precious stones into densely layered surfaces built through sanding, masking, pouring, and abrasion. What initially reads as illusionistic begins to fracture under close viewing into dense surfaces of texture, abrasion, and accumulation.
Kenny constructs many of the paintings through nested compositional frameworks: images placed within images, objects suspended against saturated fields, decorative patterns layered beneath sharply rendered forms. Checkerboards, oversized shells, marbled surfaces, and ornamental borders compete with the objects they frame, allowing the paintings to shift between still life, collage, and staged display. In works such as Martini Olives and Homage to the Mongers and the Makers, food becomes increasingly stylized and theatrical, hovering between appetite, advertisement, and image.
Humor and strangeness remain central throughout the exhibition. Kenny is drawn equally to images she finds beautiful, absurd, excessive, grotesque, or visually satisfying. Family heirlooms, Americana, culinary rituals, decorative aesthetics, and food imagery accumulate into compositions that resist a stable sense of time or place. Rather than constructing fixed narratives, Kenny allows meaning to emerge gradually through juxtaposition, repetition, and material transformation.
In The Tasting Room, paintings behave less like static images than evolving arrangements. Images accumulate, separate, and recombine. Preparation becomes performance. Ornament becomes structure. Meaning emerges slowly through repetition, juxtaposition, and material transformation.
