Private View: Saturday, 6th December 2025, 4-7pm
West Palm Beach
‘Symposium’, a group exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, explores the potential of food and eating as cultural, political, and artistic activity. In ancient Greece, a symposium was a gathering for feasting, drinking, conversation, music, dance, poetry, and entertainment – events held to mark a particular occasion, achievement, or life event. In this show, contemporary artists reimagine the symposium through the lens of their own cultures and identities. What does the modern dinner party represent today? Can it still offer a platform for serious discussion, philosophical thought, and radical exchange as well as indulgence, pleasure and transgression?
London-based artist Amy Dury’s vividly coloured paintings transport us into a middle-class ‘luncheon party’ and an unidentified social gathering. Drawing on British social documentary photography from the 1970s and 80s, she captures moments suspended between nostalgia and discomfort. Her acid tones and blurred faces evoke the instability of memory: how we mythologise the past even as it slips from view. Falk Gernegroß’s paintings similarly dwell in a soft haze of remembrance or times past. Depicting young women at rest after a picnic or feeding one another grapes, his works play on the sensuality and symbolism of food to suggest sexual awakening, indulgence and desire.
For Sabrina Bockler, the feast teeters between delight and destruction. Her paintings make visible the moment excess tips into chaos – where animals fight over food, wine spills, and the order of the table collapses. Juan de la Rica finds a similar tension within ritualised celebration: in his works, nude figures gather to eat and drink, yet their detachment and unease betray the awkwardness of social performance.
Coady Brown captures that same disquiet through the image of two guests arriving late to a party. One offers flowers, yet their strained gestures hint at unspoken dynamics beneath the surface. Adrian Kay Wong turns to quieter scenes of domestic intimacy: moments around the dining table rendered with graphic precision and cultural specificity, featuring chopsticks, donabe pots, cherry blossom. His works transform the everyday ritual of eating into a poetic meditation on belonging and estrangement, where each meal becomes a fleeting act of connection.
Pakistani artist Rabia Farooqui explores the dinner party as an act of rebellion against conservative social codes. Indulge without thinking depicts one woman lying on the ground eating spaghetti with her hands while another cradles a glass of wine, in defiance of Islamic prohibitions on alcohol. Heidi Ukkonen also considers the table as a stage for performance and power. In Vogue, the dining scene becomes a spectacle of desire and spectatorship: one figure poses for the viewer, while another hovers between indulgence and introspection. In The Last Supper, she reinterprets the Biblical meal as a reflection on consumption and communion – what it means to share, to witness and to be witnessed.
In his meticulously composed interiors, Nicholas Bono Kennedy examines how we aestheticise our domestic spaces. His painted rooms, laid with tables ready for tea or wine, pulse with colour and dappled light, evoking both anticipation and performance. Similarly, Tuan Vu’s works draw on the decorative traditions of Les Nabis and the flattened planes of Japanese prints to create ornate, otherworldly scenes. Within their beauty lies a quiet resilience: an invitation to find joy and serenity amid life’s turbulence.
Hynek Martinec continues his dialogue with art history, responding here to Willem Kalf’s Still Life with Drinking Horn (1653, National Gallery, London). Two paintings of glossy lobsters – one resting on a plate, another draped over a limp octopus – reflect on ambition, vanity, and mortality, while a depiction of two statues in silent communion pays homage to the enduring conversation between past and present.
Claire Partington also revisits the mythic origins of the feast. Her ceramic sculptures and paintings reimagine Bacchus/Dionysus in contemporary guise: young men slumped beyond revelry, too drunk or stoned to stand, and three women at table, one assuming the mantle of a female Bacchus. These figures hover between joy and exhaustion, celebration and collapse. Kelechi Nwaneri, meanwhile, considers the table as a site of genuine connection, where social, economic, and cultural boundaries might dissolve. His painting, based on a video of a shared lunch in Venice, captures the convivial, transformative potential of conversation across difference.
Laura Tanner examines the fragile intersections between social and climate justice through the lens of food and gathering traditions. The work she presents here reflects on the shifting landscape of Palm Beach County, imagining acts of care and preservation through gestures of stacking, hanging, and wrapping.
Men’s formal leather dress shoes are the central motif of Jonny Briggs’ works. They appear as sculptures in absurdist, animalistic forms with elongated tips bent into bizarre angles, creating playful interventions within the gallery space. Meanwhile, Maha Ahmed dreams up imaginary worlds in which her characters - often mythical or hybrid creatures - are in some way at odds with their surroundings. Her works draw inspiration from traditional Persian and Mughal manuscripts and classical Japanese painting techniques.
Together, the works in Symposium reveal dining not merely as an act of sustenance or spectacle, but as a site of exchange – where pleasure and anxiety, memory and invention intertwine. Across these diverse tables, the artists remind us that to eat, to share, and to gather is a ritual that remains as vital, complex, and transformative as ever.
