Meal time! Fine Art Hall

With the Mahlzeit! exhibition series, the Museum Gunzenhauser 2026 is dedicating itself to the theme of food in art.
More than everyday consumer products, food in art has become an artistic and historical documentation of human and social conditions and concerns. It becomes a carrier of meaning and images of socio-political discourses and socio-economic conditions, social orders, cultural codes, intercultural diversity and power structures.

We welcome you to the Feinkunsthalle with our first exhibition. Based on the spatial structures of a store, you can discover the most delicious food and luxury foods from the holdings of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in the exhibition rooms of the Feinkunsthalle. From the in-house bakery to the fruit and vegetable department, along the meat counter to the chewing gum at the checkout, the exhibition presents a wide range of artistic representations of food across the ages.
As an existential component of human life, depictions of food have always been a central and multi-layered motif in art.

From numerous still lifes, which serve as the primary genre of food depiction in art history, to the reform movements in the 1920s, in which questions about vegetarian and vegan lifestyles gained in importance, malnutrition in unstable phases and the consumption of meat - in the Feinkunsthalle 's multi-perspective compilation, historical and contemporary works enter into a dialog about food as a cultural, economic and social product.

Feinkunsthalle explores the representation of the consumption and cultural history of food in art. What stories can be told on the basis of food depictions? Which products were consumed at a certain time and how?
What can we learn from this about historical contexts?