Warren Laine-Naida was born in England and grew up in Canada. He studied marketing, English literature and received his chef’s papers. He has worked 20 years in food and 10 years in marketing & communication. He has lived in Germany since 1993 where he developed his chocolate sculptures as an extension of his pastry work. He is married and has two sons, Christopher and Robyn.

The notion of birth is the stylistic drive to Warren Laine-Naida’s poetics. For him it is, first of all, a core of a thousand faces and an ideal receptacle for experiencing the rupture of meanings: “The audience accepts chocolate and is asked to accept a sculpture in chocolate. To accept a new signified using the old signifier. It is an expression of the inexplicable, of the double meaning.”

Chocolate is a versatile artistic medium and a cultural icon, but Laine-Naida saw it making flesh under natural demiurges like fire, humidity, mould, seism, time – as well as industrial and fashion trends. It expressed caved-in figures of piety and motherhood, then suburban distress blown with shattered glass, tainted with toxic waste, wax or barbed wire. Now it expresses the glamorous heaven of commodities production.

Through the art of Warren Laine-Naida, the multiple faces and reveries of chocolate have been freed from the garden of our narrow gastronomical delights. He emancipated it from alimentary colonialism into a frenzy of chemical expressions that range from alchemy to sexuality to language.

The book Art in chocolate conveys the four seasons through full-page photos of the ornate and unexpected chocolate sculptures of artist Warren Laine-Naida. A seasonal short story and recipe accompany each sculpture. The stories and recipes are in english, german, russian, spanish, french and japanese.

2009 “colour water chocolate” Bremen, Germany (with Larissa Kühler)
Other Shows in 2009: Toronto (08/09), Bremen (08/09), London (10/09), Paderborn (10/09), Wien (11/09)

2007-2008 “innocence in black and white” Halle, Germany
2006 “No More Words“ Bremen, Germany
2005 “mit den Augen Essen – begehren und überdruss“ Wien, Austria (group exhibit)
2004 “Das Bekannte und das Unbekannte“ Linz, Austria (with Ulrike Merk)
2003 “7 Deadly Sins“ London, Canada (with Joan Brennan)
2002 “Chocolarte” London, Canada
1999 “Read Between the Words” Vancouver, Canada
1997 “A Fantasy of Cake” Munich, Germany