The Hell Fire Dining Club

Exhibition
22/1 2004 — 8/2 2004
Karlsplatz

Karlsplatz, Vienna. Deep in the crucible of art, food, alcohol and mystical technology, equidistant from the Baltic, the Atlantic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, beneath a suspended ceiling of crocodiles, sturgeons and sharks, Paul Renner, Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray are at work again! In strokes of fire they sketch out the smoky hexagrammaton of Catherine the Great, Athanasius Kircher, Sigmund Freud, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Alexis Soyer and Oscar Wilde. A new restaurant is conceived! A gastronomic theatre of memory!

Four chambers, installed in the glass aquarium of the Kunsthalle, comprise this unique and visionary creation: the teatro anatomico, the zambracca, the pharmacy, the visionarium.

By day the rooms form an exhibition. By night (starting at 7 p.m.) they are transformed into a restaurant, a temple of decadent cuisine, pulsing with baroque energy, fuelled by turbulent cocktails, rare wines, and food from the laboratories of the world’s most elaborately experimental culinary artists.