The Drawing Center will present Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity, January 25 - February 28, 2014, the first major museum exhibition to focus on the visualization and drawing practices of master chef Ferran Adrià. The exhibition will emphasize the role of drawing in Adrià’s quest to understand creativity. His complex body of work positions the medium as both a philosophical tool-used to organize and convey knowledge, meaning, and signification-as well as a physical objecc-used to synthesize over twenty years of innovation in the kitchen. MOCA Cleveland will host the exhibition September 26, 2014 through January 18, 2015.

Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity will chart the origins of this innovator’s intellectual and philosophical ideas about gastronomy that have forever changed how we understand food. These ideas will be presented as wall graphics, framed prints, and related ephemera. The exterior of a large cube in the center of the Main Gallery will feature large-scale photographic reproductions of elBulli’s kitchen during service. A series of vitrines around the cube will display a selection of elBulli notebooks documenting menu development, product taxonomies, and personal notes; architectural drawings and a model of the new elBulli Foundation headquarters; elBulli’s plasticine food models; and drawings and prototypes related to elBulli’s dishware, utensils, menus, and graphic identity. Inside the cube Adria’s “working boards” will lean against large-scale documentary photographs of the elBulli archive in Barcelona. These boards were used in the elBulli atelier to document and organize research, menu development, and photography.

The Drawing Center’s Lab gallery will screen Documenting Documenta about Adrià’s participation in Documenta 12, and will debut 1846, a film produced by The Drawing Center that will feature images of every dish that Adrià served at elBulli.

Curated by Brett Littman, Executive Director.