Artistic pastry and coffee table. Kivipankki, Jämsä 1994; Galerie Sculptor, Helsinki 1995; Turku Art Museum 1995
In the beginning of the 1990ties Andersson planned to leave the art world and start a restaurant. Due to the recession, which hit Finland at that time, he wasn’t able to realize his idea. But the thought of doing art connected to life and the ritual of eating still haunted his mind. In 1993 he started to do eating performances with his artist friend Kari Juutilainen (later to become the group Edible Finns together with artist Pertti Toikkanen) and the same year he borrowed his friend’s café for one week on a small Island in the archipelago outside Turku. There he made and served cakes shaped like the primary forms and coloured according the Kandinsky’s diagram; yellow for the triangle, red for the square and blue for the triangle.
In 1994 he made a complete café interior in Kivipankki Gallery in Jämsä. For this café exhibition he designed his first table, complete with chairs shaped like the primary cakes served on the table. The legs of the table were wooden window frames. The milk was served from a can designed for car oil. The sugar was placed in a metal tube and had a polar bear living in it. The vase with flowers was turned around so that the flowers were spread out in the middle of the table as an intarsia-ornament. The cream was served from a copper coffee pot with a surface made of glued coffee beans.
The table was the first in a series of art tables made during the following decades, ending up as a table philosophy presented along with the six coffee book tables designed for the company Beautiful Mistake in 2015.
On the windows of the gallery Andersson painted insects directly on the glass. Outside he made a large table shaped like a coffee cup, where people – besides enjoying their coffee – could carve and draw on the surface.
