This Giant Food Art Will Change the Way You Look at Pizza

The old adage is that something (or someone) with great aesthetic value "looks good enough to eat." For artist Peter Anton, this expression has a much more literal twist.

Anton's work is a veritable smorgasbord of oversized, lifelike foods, rendered in close detail but on a highly magnified scale. Picture your favorite summer ice cream cone, but blown up to the size of your 12-year-old cousin. Imagine feasting on a fried egg that could cover your work desk, or a slice of pepperoni pizza that's bigger than your hallway rug. There's a reason why Anton has been referred to as "Candy Warhol"—this is pop art at its tastiest, and it has found a place in the art collections of figure such as Rolling Stone Keith Richards and Sony CEO Howard Stringer. Think of Claes Oldenburg's flaccid sculptures reinflated, with renderings in exquisite, true-to-life form.

Anton has been hard at work creating his fantastical foods for more than 20 years, but his latest project has been the "Foodhist Temple," a zen, candlelit, red-walled room of gustatory solace currently installed in New York City's Unix Gallery. In the Temple, you can worship a massive box of chocolates, reflect on a cheeseburger that could feed a whole classroom of ninth-graders, and meditate in front of a chocolate cake that would never fit in your oven. And this isn't Anton's first foray into elaborate riffs on the museum environment; at 2012's Art Basel, he designed a roller coaster called Sugar and Gomorrah that led viewers on a literal ride through strange, decadent land of candy and ice cream (to a soundtrack of Lesley Gore's "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows").

To find out more about this food fixation, we got in touch with Anton to find out what makes him tick.

Hi Peter! What was the origin of your idea to create oversized foods? When considering a certain food to sculpt, I consider the colors, shapes, and textures that I find exciting. I also think it's important to select foods that connect with people in an emotional way. It was very natural for me to use food as a subject matter when I created my first piece, since I was always interested in food. As a young child, I would stare at my plate and study and get excited about the various colors and properties of food. My first "food" sculpture was of a frozen TV dinner. At that time I was not very interested in making the pieces look photorealistic. That came later.

What kind of materials and process do you use to create them? Foods are vastly different from each other, so I need to constantly develop new techniques and use many different materials when creating these pieces. Some of the materials I use are resin, wood, metal, clay, plastics, and acrylics.

Do you model them from real food, from photos, or neither? In my studio, I surround myself with the specific food I will be creating into a sculpture. Sometimes I read about that food and its history and how it's made. Let's say I am going to make a giant boxed donuts sculpture; I will get donuts from different stores and study them, break them apart, study the different characteristics. I smell them, eat them. I surround my work area with them. I have to do this over and over because they lose the fresh look as time goes on. After I am confident that I know donuts, I will then start to consider what materials I will use in order to get the effects and look that I demand.

How do you think the scale changes the way that people view these foods? Making my sculptures oversized and imposing makes the viewer pause and feel the importance and reverence for food. This creates a shortcut to their soul so that I can activate their emotions.

Are these all foods that you like to eat? I have favorites foods to eat and favorite foods to sculpt. I love to eat pasta in olive oil and garlic, but beige on beige would be a bland-looking dish as a sculpture. I am not crazy about sushi, but the colors make an amazing work of art.

Tell me more about the Foodhist Temple and the kind of environment you wanted to create. I wanted to create a special sanctuary, a place of meditation, peace, and happiness—a shrine devoted to the celebration of food and life where people can relax, reflect, and achieve a heightened awareness of the importance of food and all of its pleasures. I hope viewers leave the show thinking about our relationship with food.

How do you see food as fitting into pop art? I never think about how my work is labeled or categorized. I don't want my creative process to be influenced by external forces. I am more concerned about getting the color right on the raspberry filling in a jelly donut!

What new pieces are you working on now? I am currently working on a giant slab of raw meat.

Thanks for talking with us.