Bread Show – review

Taking the rise: Bread Show. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

Baking in the UK has experienced something of a boom in popularity recently, perhaps due in part to the success of the Great British Bake Off – but the bread on display at Space Studios is for consuming with the eyes.

Bread Show is a collaborative project by artists Maxime Iten, Sophie Lee, Will Robinson and Robert Self that explores the idea of bread as a symbol of the physical body and as something social that pulls people together (the word ‘company’ means, etymologically, to share bread together).

This is expressed using a variety of bread sculptures, including hand gestures expressing a range of emotions and issues, including class, history and creativity.

In conversation with the artist and baker Carlos Monleon Gendall, Bread Show artist Sophie Lee said: “If bread is this kind of ultimately social material it contains within it great expanses of history.

“We can read it almost as a cipher of different times, from industrial bakeries to these communal ovens, all the way back to when wheat was first cultivated – basically the beginnings of our civilisation.”

Bread Show runs until 15 December at Space Studios 129-131 Mare Street, E8 3RH