Gabriele Galimberti: In Her Kitchen

About the exhibition

The exhibition was on view from 10 November 2024 through 6 July 2025 at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim in the rem-Stiftungsmuseen C4,12.

With "In Her Kitchen", Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti (*1977) undertakes a photographic and culinary journey through kitchens of the world. Created for a report on couchsurfing, he photographed grandmothers in their home kitchens and their signature dishes. The 58 portraits document in a very personal way the universal language of food, family and hospitality. Wherever Galimberti spent the night as a couchsurfer, he asked his hosts to meet the grandmother, cook and eat with her. These encounters were not only an initial approach to the sometimes unfamiliar ingredients and cooking techniques of the respective country's cuisine, but also reveal private insights into the importance that cooking can have as an expression of cultural identity, tradition and love – no matter which country on Earth you sit down to eat.

Stylistically, the photographs for "In Her Kitchen" follow Gabriele Galimberti's idiosyncratic pictorial concept of portraits and accurately arranged objects. The focus is always on people, so that despite their formalist rigor, his photographs sensitively disclose the diverse spectrum of everyday human life.

"In Her Kitchen" is accompanied by a catalogue published by Nünnerich-Asmus-Verlag. The exhibition is part of the major special exhibition Essen und Trinken. Reisen durch Körper & Zeit at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim.