Cooking with John 
2021
Haydens
Melbourne, Australia

Curated by Amalia Lindo and Jacqueline Stojanović

Artists: Justin Andrews, Stephen Bram, Alinta Brown, Isabella Darcy, Laura Delaney, Stefano Condello, Gerard Kodde, Amalia Lindo, Rose Nolan, David Palliser, Rachel Schenberg, Jacqueline Stojanović, Hayden Stuart & Rudi Williams.

A John Nixon lunch is soup, reheated on the stovetop, with a different recipe from week to week. It is “only two olives left, one for me, one for you”. It is red capsicums in a pink bowl and green cucumber on a blue plate; an assemblage of colour and form like a constructed painting, which sometimes shares the lunch table. On other occasions, a pie or a sausage offers a departure from the usual routine. Occasionally there is cake, always there is bread.

Enacted almost as ritual, our weekly lunch provided a pause in the day’s work. With John, the table was a site for eating, working, and talking, just as the food upon which it was served offered more than a form of sustenance — at times, it too became a new material for his practice. For John, food could also be used as an analogical tool for discussion on art and life.

“Show ten loaves of bread, okay, we understand what you do.”

Cooking with John takes its cue from a selection of John’s food analogies, recorded by his most recent assistants, Amalia Lindo and Jacqueline Stojanović. The exhibition is a testimonial to John’s teachings through the presentation of new works by the artist friends and mentees from Nixon’s wide circle who have also had the pleasure of sharing John’s table. We present Cooking with John as an “anti- cookbook” wherein the analogies are the recipes and the artworks are the ingredients.

The head chef has left but the kitchen remains open.
Amalia Lindo and Jacqueline Stojanović
Click here for digital roomsheet.

Image Details

4 of 60,480 (Red)
2021
Photographic paper on dibond, aluminium frame, aluminium pipe, steel flange
Dimensions variable

Images courtesy of Christo Crocker









© Amalia Lindo 2024