New commission for In Situ, Chef Corey Lee's restaurant at the new SFMOMA

Tucker Nichols
Specials, 2016
Fifty framed works on paper
Commissioned by SFMOMA; courtesy the artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco

Through a group of lyrical, graphically-engaging gouache paintings on paper installed in various places within In Situ, Bay Area artist Tucker Nichols considers the visual character of contemporary food. “What is food today? What does it look like, and why do we take so many photographs of it?” he asks. “I think of Specials as a wall of trophies celebrating the creative achievements of the world’s best chefs from a decidedly outside perspective.”  Like the abstract art that appears in many of SFMOMA’s galleries, food, too, can be a universal language all of its own.