5.3.–19.4.2026

Many persons who are still alive have seen him wandering among the autumn mists in the bog at Ulfsboda. Either on foot, with a tall and wide hat on his head, or on horseback, mounted on a stately black steed whose shoes are, in popular legend, commonly said to be forged out of clear silver.
– observations of Odin as a ‘nocturnal phantom’ in Sweden in the 1860s*

‘A cameo appearance if you ever saw one’, Kasper Bosmans (Belgium, 1990, lives in Brussels) says about his diptych Tails (2022), one of the ‘legend’ paintings in this exhibition. This particular painting builds on the 1969 work Dwarf Parade Table – with a blue-capped plaster garden gnome and blown-out eggs suspended under a wooden table – by American artist Paul Thek, whose oeuvre and persona have inspired many contemporary artists identifying as queer.

While relevant to Bosmans’s thinking and to his exhibition at Kohta, his first ever in a Nordic country, this particular piece of background information is nevertheless not of first-order importance for understanding them. So let us first delve into two notions that are.

A cameo is a small carved gem, often encountered in Greek and Roman art. The metaphorical use of the word to signify ‘a small, distinct and detailed piece of art within a larger work’ has, in turn, led to the expression ‘cameo appearance’: a brief and often uncredited performance by a well-known character. Think of Alfred Hitchcock suddenly appearing in his own films.

In Latin, legenda is ‘something to be read’, originally about the life of a saint. Nowadays it is any story that is unverifiable but still conveys something that is true, if only about human life in general. A legend is not just something literary but also something literal: a text next to an image or a symbol, tasked with explaining and explicating it. It attempts to mediate between two related but distinct realms of articulation, the visual and the verbal.

Bosmans is an internationally visible artist whose increasingly complex and open-ended practice was purposely built around a tension between his smaller-scale legend paintings – typically executed in gouache and silver point on poplar panels and meant to be, among other things, collectable – and his immersive painting installations – typically meant to be temporary appearances at a specific site. Our exhibition contains both kinds of work, and in addition sculptural objects and larger paintings.

At the heart of every attempt at translating between image and word is an ambiguity that Bosmans, like many other artists of his generation, revels in exploiting. ‘Serious’ contemporary art very often reflects ambitions that are both conflicting and complementary. Artists make visually impactful surfaces, driven by their longing for the untranslatable Gestaltung (which might be loosely rendered as ‘bringing-to-life-through-form’). At the same time they build intellectually seductive background narratives, driven by their passion for digging up facts and ordering them into stories.

Odinn Always Winking (One Blue Eye) (2024), the enamel painting we have chosen as the campaign image for our exhibition, meaningfully illustrates this multi-dimensional stance. Bosmans offers us Odin, the father of gods, simultaneously as Gestalt and character, with stylised outlines in a subdued palette. As someone hailing from one of the many borderlands of Germanic culture, the Dutch-speaking Belgian province of Limburg, he has a special fascination for this liminal figure, which he depicts tucked into a somewhat abstracted bed flanked by his two ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (mind or memory). The horizontal black lines with their curved edges stand in for a tightly pulled blanket. Odin – the extra n is Bosmans’s own queering of his name – was, if we put any trust in etymology, originally ‘the lord of frenzy’, ‘the leader of the possessed’. He is the god of ecstasy and divination and healing, and therefore a shamanic figure, but also the god of the dead and of war, demanding human sacrifice, and the god of poetry and runic writing, which in Norse antiquity had everything to do with drawing and image-making.

Long considered vanquished by another, supposedly more mild-mannered celestial patriarch, Odin continues to roam the outskirts of our ungodly civilisation, usually at night as it seems. People today, Bosmans says, connect more willingly to the forever shapeshifting Odin than to Catholic saints. ‘He is eerie and dark, but there is still a lot of affection for him. Stories – legends – need to be told and retold. We need to convince ourselves that tomorrow will feel the same as today.’

The ‘tucking into bed’ theme recurs in the legend paintings – and also the ‘winking’ theme, but that is another story. How can Odin wink anyway, if he has already sacrificed one of his eyes at the well of wisdom? In our exhibition we have the diptych Drowsy and Torpid for Love (2022), where Bosmans approaches the trope of hibernation (slowing down one’s heartbeat as a deliberate measure for surviving winter or heartbreak) by putting to bed a woodboring beetle and a goldfish, both famously good at strategic withdrawal into torpor. History in the Making (2024) features another woodboring beetle, on another chalet-style bed, dreaming about a multi-coloured glazed-brick wall of the kind erected throughout the world to assert the insular architectural supremacy of the Germanic coloniser.

In Digging for Dirt (2024) a silhouetted woodpecker is substituted for the weevil, ‘because she is burrowing for what is already written in the wood, and to lay her eggs inside it. This link between a past and a future reveals the paradoxical foundation of dendrochronology.’ Mercurial Timepiece (2025) is a rendering, in artfully patinated bronze, of a severed tree trunk cut on the slant to reveal the annual rings, as if in a pedagogical display of the passage of time, complete with indicators and colour codes. This is a portrait of growth under ever-changing conditions, fatter and leaner, good times and bad, but also ‘a self-portrait of the artist slowly moving towards adolescence’.

There are other legend paintings, detailing the renaissance floor tiles of the lost palace at Breda in the Netherlands (Drowsy and Torpid Shenanigans, 2022), the Amazonian indigenous practice of curling the feathers of live parrots by having them ingest frog poison, misunderstood as an innate feature by English zoologists (Holotype, 2023) or why cuckoos avoid mixing their own genetic material with that of their unwitting hosts (Key Sound and Skeleton Key, both 2024).

It is precisely the detailing that serves the purpose of storytelling, Bosmans says. Yet images, although more and more predominant in contemporary culture, are notoriously hard to pin down. ‘Paradoxically, the more detailed I become, the more aggressively viewers respond to not being told, in so many words, what these paintings are about. People are demanding a legend for the legend, as it were. They seem to be afraid of dreaming, letting things simmer, letting them rest.’ Society has also lost some of its previously agreed codes for understanding visual cues, for instance the tradition of decoding heraldry (a major source of inspiration for Bosmans’s earlier work) or even reading paper maps or cursive handwriting.

‘A Cameo Appearance’ also includes two very new and rather larger paintings in acrylic dispersion, pencil and silverpoint on oak panel, both variations on a theme that is rather new for Bosmans: the pea pod as a visual organising principle or organic cabinet of curiosities. Great Shoes to Fill (2026) presents the spectacle of sarcophagi from the last, Ptolemaic, dynasty of Egypt displayed as if about to be brain-scanned inside the pod, the soles of their feet touching Bosmans’s fanciful reconstruction of Odin’s patterned shoes and socks. Ass (2026) offers another borderline Teutonic take on Mediterranean antiquity, this time Apuleius’s late-second-century novel Asinus aureus (The Golden Ass), and Gallic esprit (Duchamp’s Étant donnés rendered with needle-point-like colour pixels).

The exhibition is embedded, quite literally, in its most immediately noticeable layer: ten free-standing wall elements, the different nuances of green, red, yellow and blue on these elements and the regular walls and, most significantly, a mural in the form of a frieze, titled Folds (Sea, Outside, Plow, Bunk) (2026). It folds around the upper parts of the regular walls and continues the sheet and blanket motifs that we recognise from the tucked-in legendary characters, while gently transforming into a landscape and a seascape. This sets the stage for all the appearances that have already been detailed. The work Grub Slumber (2024), a series of wall-mounted plexiglass objects in the shape of grubs (larvae of the woodboring beetle), has been added as a final touch of transience, sowing doubt and creating a sense that the exhibition is eating itself from within.

Kasper Bosmans’s works have been kindly lent by Gladstone Gallery and Mendes Wood DM, both in Brussels, and by the artist himself.

Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius, Wärend och Virdarne. Ett försök i Svensk Ethnologi (Wärend and Its People: An Attempt at Swedish Ethnology) Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & söner, 1863, p. 214 (quoted in Klaus Böldl, Oden. Den mörke guden (Odin: The Dark God). Gothenburg: Daidalos, 2024, p. 189