A Cameo Appearance

Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans (b. 1990, Brussels) presents his first Nordic exhibition at Kohta, combining legend paintings, immersive installations, and sculpture around two guiding concepts: the cameo — a brief, telling appearance within a larger work — and the legend, both as unverifiable yet resonant story and as explanatory text beside an image. His practice thrives in the tension between the visual and the verbal.

The show's centrepiece is Odinn Always Winking (One Blue Eye) (2024), an enamel painting depicting Odin tucked into bed with his ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory). Coming from the border region of Dutch-speaking Limburg, Bosmans feels a strong affinity for this shape-shifting Norse god of war, poetry, and ecstasy. The deliberate extra n in "Odinn" is his own queering of the name. Odin, he argues, resonates with contemporary audiences more than Catholic saints — eerie yet beloved, a figure around whom stories must keep circulating.

A recurring "tucking into bed" motif runs through his smaller silverpoint-and-gouache legend paintings: a beetle and goldfish hibernate in Drowsy and Torpid for Love (2022); a woodpecker burrows through wood in Digging for Dirt (2024), linking past and future through dendrochronology. Mercurial Timepiece (2025), a bronze cast of a slanted tree trunk, renders the same theme sculpturally. Two new larger paintings introduce the pea pod as an organic cabinet of curiosities, weaving together Egyptian antiquity, Norse mythology, and art historical references.

The whole exhibition is enveloped by a wraparound mural frieze, Folds (2026), which transforms blanket-and-sheet motifs into landscape and seascape. Plexiglass grub sculptures dotted throughout add a final unsettling undertone — as though the exhibition were slowly consuming itself from within.