First published in Vegetable Growers Weekly
Hannah Gralle’s London show at Pimlico Wilde is the first time for years that vegetables have taken centre stage in the art world. With Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables, Gralle takes a blowtorch to the sacred canon of cinema and flambés it with a distinctly postmodern irreverence. The result? A madcap, meticulously crafted reenactment of Orson Welles’ magnum opus using vegetables, stock cubes, and single malt.
Gralle’s stop-motion recreation comes startlingly close to the original’s visual grammar. It is not parody so much as culinary homage, recalling Jan Švankmajer filtered through a Waitrose aesthetic. The vegetables—carved, posed, occasionally withered—inhabit their roles with uncanny sincerity. Charles Foster Kane as a slightly bruised aubergine? It shouldn’t work, and yet it does.
The culmination of the film is a scene which isn’t in the original Citizen Kane, in which the entire cast is ceremonially consumed in a scene echoing Babette’s Feast. It is a masterstroke. Here, Gralle conjures a melancholic ephemerality: celluloid gives way to digestion, legacy to compost. Welles gave us “Rosebud”; Gralle gives us “roast bud.” Both are emblems of decay and memory, though only one is edible.
Beyond the screen, the conceptual rigor continues. The option for collectors to purchase the uneaten vegetable cast members—presumably now vacuum-packed relics—feels too arch. There is a sly commentary here on art commodification, perhaps even on the organic perils of preservation.
Gralle’s work oscillates between Dadaist prank and sincere tribute. If it wins the newly proposed Oscar category of Animated versions of classic films using vegetables, it will not be for novelty alone, but for achieving the rarest thing in contemporary art: taking the ridiculous and making it sublime.
In Citizen Kane versus The Vegetables, Hannah Gralle offers us not just a new lens on a classic, but a wholly new sensorial grammar of adaptation. It is cinema as gastronomy, sculpture as satire, and consumption as critique. Five stars from us.
