The British Institute of Florence is presenting Piece of Cake, a new exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Rachel Weinstock and curated by Jemma Elliott-Israelson through October 10.
Across a body of paintings and epoxy resin sculpture, Weinstock examines what remains after a party has ended: the cakes, ribbons, disposable tableware and remnants that persist as image, object and archive long after their original purpose has passed. The cake recurs throughout the exhibition as a central motif, appearing and reappearing across canvases until it functions less as an object than as a cultural symbol, in a manner that recalls Wayne Thiebaud’s mid-century paintings of pastries and cakes rendered in thick, confectionery-like paint.
“The exhibition also situates itself within a much older tradition of still life painting,” says curator Jemma Elliott-Israelson. “Dutch still life and vanitas painting of the 16th and 17th centuries including the banquet pieces of Clara Peeters, one of the genre’s earliest and most accomplished practitioners used lavish depictions of food and luxury objects to meditate on abundance, excess and the inevitability of decay. Weinstock’s paintings, made directly on used tablecloths and cloth napkins, extend this lineage into contemporary material culture, while her resin cubes which permanently encase discarded party ephemera invert the genre’s logic altogether, arresting disposable objects at the precise moment of their obsolescence rather than picturing their decline.”
Staged in Florence, the exhibition’s engagement with abundance, mortality and the moral weight of objects finds a natural home in a city whose Renaissance workshops helped establish still life as a vehicle for philosophical and theological reflection. Piece of Cake proposes that the birthday cake and the party favour are the modern inheritors of that tradition, vessels for the same enduring questions about what we choose to preserve and what we allow to disappear.
The exhibition includes a series of large-scale cake paintings, a group of works painted on unstretched napkins and tablecloths, a collection of epoxy resin sculptures, and The Feast, a large-scale painting that gathers the exhibition’s central motifs into a single, densely accumulated composition.
“I’m interested in the point where pleasure, abundance and beauty begin to tip into excess or unease,” says Weinstock, “and in the way ordinary objects can become carriers of memory. The work is ultimately about our desire to hold onto moments that are, by nature, impossible to preserve.”
Piece of Cake is being shown in the SOTTO al British contemporary arts and events space at The British Institute of Florence (lungarno Guicciardini 15). Open 2-6pm Monday to Friday and 10am-1pm Saturdays through October 10. Free admission.
