MAZE/Gastronomy Milan: Chefs X Artists

In April 2025, during the overlapping weeks of Miart and Salone del Mobile, MAZE inaugurated the first edition of MAZE/Gastronomy Milan: Chefs × Artists, a city-wide festival exploring the creative dialogue between contemporary art and gastronomy.

Conceived around a simple yet ambitious premise—that chefs are artists in their own right—the project sought to create meaningful encounters between two disciplines that share a common language of experimentation, craftsmanship, intuition, and sensory experience. Rather than treating gastronomy as a complement to art, MAZE approached both practices as parallel forms of artistic expression capable of entering into genuine conversation.

Over ten days, from 3 to 12 April 2025, nine of Milan's leading contemporary art galleries each invited one of their represented artists and paired them with a chef from a restaurant they personally valued within the city. Together, they created a series of singular dinners hosted across Milan, transforming restaurants into temporary exhibition spaces where culinary creations and artworks resonated with one another.

Each evening unfolded as a unique collaboration. Special menus were conceived for the occasion, while works by participating artists were installed throughout the dining environments, establishing a dialogue between visual and gastronomic narratives. The result was neither an exhibition nor a dinner series, but a hybrid format where the boundaries between disciplines became increasingly porous.

The inaugural edition brought together an exceptional group of galleries, artists and chefs: ERASTUDIO Gallery with Nanda Vigo and Matteo Pancetti; Galleria Franco Noero with Robert Mapplethorpe and Tomaž Kavčič; Gregor Staiger with Monster Chetwynd and Konstantinos Rampias; Kaufmann Repetto with Gianni Caravaggio and Silvio Battistoni; Lia Rumma with Thomas Ruff and Katrin Steindl; MASSIMODECARLO with Christian Holstad and Gennaro Esposito; Mazzoleni with Salvatore Astore and Stefano Di Gennaro; Piero Atchugarry with Chris Soal and Ksenija Mahorčič; and Raffaella Cortese with Joan Jonas and Michele Cobuzzi.

MAZE/Gastronomy Milan emerged from a series of earlier experiments conducted between 2022 and 2023 in Geneva, Paris and Monaco, where renowned chefs and contemporary artists were invited to collaborate around the theme of urban gardens. Building on those explorations, the Milan edition established a new platform dedicated to fostering encounters between creative practices, audiences and cultural communities.

By bringing art out of the gallery and gastronomy beyond the restaurant table, Chefs × Artists proposed an alternative way of experiencing both disciplines: intimate, collective and deeply rooted in the act of sharing.

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Photo cover: Christian Holstad ceramic during dinner at Caruso Nuovo Bistrot, organized in collaboration with MASSIMODECARLO gallery, Melania Dalle Grave, DSL Studio

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