History is full of great kitchens. There is the bustling, servant filled kitchen of the Dutch Golden Age, eager to display the abundance of the trade routes. There is the quiet, milk pouring domesticity of Vermeer. And then there is the artist’s studio. This is a kitchen of a different sort, where raw ingredients are chopped, boiled, and occasionally burnt in the pursuit of something palatable.

Taking its title from Charlie Roberts’ painting Joy of cooking, the exhibition treats the creative process less like a divine reception of ideas and more like a frantic Tuesday night dinner prep. The titular work nods to the classic cookbook while featuring a portrait of Francis Ford Coppola, who presides over the composition like a patron saint of chaotic production.

Roberts anchors the show by turning the domestic sphere into a site of surreal invention. In Kitchen Confidential, he mines his own history, basing the room on his childhood kitchen. Yet the inhabitants are imported from the genre paintings of Jan Steen, the 17th-century Dutch master famous for his lively depictions of messy households. Here, Steen’s figures are dressed in outfits plucked from advertisements, creating a collision of personal memory, art history, and commercial gloss.

In Friedrich apple pie, Roberts riffs on Georg Friedrich Kersting’s famous 1811 painting of Caspar David Friedrich in his studio. But where the Romantic painter stared into the void of the sublime, Roberts’ figures are likely staring into a mixing bowl. This energy expands in California kitchen, a massive work on paper that presents a panoramic view of domestic chaos that feels suspiciously like the inside of a painter’s brain.

Even the frames get involved in the cooking. Roberts’ Grapes and avocado features a rough carved yellow frame that threatens to consume the image within. This tactile garnish is echoed in Sophie Larrimore’s Green lawns, which is held in a similar carved wooden frame. It is a visual rhyme that suggests these two artists might be swapping recipes.

Larrimore’s work offers a different kind of menu. Drawing on a pantry stocked with art history, from Assyrian reliefs to illuminated manuscripts, she creates a pictorial world where logic fragments. Her drawing Breakfast serves these figures in layered lines, a tangled blueprint of the feast to come. In paintings like Tough Age, however, her signature poodles are composed of small dots or pellets that appear like granular ingredients in a strange stew. These figures exist in a state of emerging chaos where the laws of physics are swapped for a flatter and more tactile reasoning. It is a concoction unlimited by the measurements of a single recipe. Her use of the carved frame in Green lawns further blurs the border between painting and object, recalling ancient traditions where the image was not just seen but felt.

Meanwhile, Trude Viken’s graphite works, Black & White Scene 1 & 2, strip the dish back to its carbon based essentials. If the kitchen is a place of warmth, Viken’s drawings are the shadow in the pantry. These are the raw, unfiltered, and slightly grotesque psychological ingredients that go into the stew, whether we wrote them down in the recipe or not.

Joy of Cooking is a spontaneous mix of old and new, a holiday potluck of inventory and fresh deliveries. It acknowledges that while art history loves a pristine final dish, the joy is often found in the messy counter, the dirty dishes, and the heat of the oven.

The exhibition runs through the holiday season. We promise not to make you do the dishes.