Eggs, symbol of fertility renewal, potentiality and perpetuation. The eggs of Bosmans’ large wall piece come from the work of the Dutch 17th-century painter Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Bosmans creates an index of eggs of every bird species depicted by d’Hondecoeter, whose meticulous ornithological paintings marked the development of a new art historical genre. They were typical of his epoch in their desire to catalogue the natural world, and d’Hondecoeter’s research was fed by knowledge brought home from the expeditions of the Dutch East and West India Trading Companies. His paintings are thus intertwined with colonial expansion and the traffic of enslaved people, and brought together Asian and European birds in a way that was only possible in art. The work’s title Bird Nose Count (2020) uses an old-fashioned word for census, and Bosmans continues d’Hondecoeter’s quasi-scientific approach by reproducing all 115 eggs to scale. He employs enamel, a material closely associated with 20th-century advertising – think Ricard, beer, stock cubes, chocolate – thus connecting an organic form and animal product with the aesthetics of marketing and consumption.