Bird Nose Count

For Bird Nose Count (2020), Kasper Bosmans was inspired by the paintings of the 17th-century artist Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Those works feature groups of birds that could only be seen together in paintings: in nature, they would live on different continents. D’Hondecoeter’s works were created in an era when colonial expansionism was giving rise to both a boom in knowledge and a desire to catalogue nature. In similarly quasi-scientific fashion, Bosmans has compiled an index of eggs for all the bird species shown and displayed them here to scale. Through the use of enamel, reminiscent of 20th-century advertising signs, he connects the zoological aspect to the aesthetics of marketing and consumerism.