"A Dining-Room”

Superimposed and wall sized. Improvisations on historic Chinoiserie wallpapers, for the dining room of a 1920’s villa in the South of Amsterdam .

Having been produced in Asia especially for the European market ever since the late 17th century, China's exquisite handpainted wallpapers have always been an strange mix of local iconography and Western dreams of Orientalist escapism ..

In this “Dining Room” the Chinoiserie-mix was taken a small step further. 
Painted collages of peony flowers and found fragments of fallen poplar twigs, visited by birds from all continents quoted from different historic albums. 
Additional snails, caterpillars, insect eggs, leaf miners and other invertebrate “plant-predators” join this cut and paste pastiche of an idealizing genre together a bit, and take it back down to earth.

By the way:
When Lady Isabella Hertford decided somewhere in the mid 1820’s to finally install the Chinese wallpaper she had once received as a gift from the Prince of Wales, during his visit for lunch at Temple Newsam some twenty years earlier, it struck her as showing not enough birds. To solve this problem she took a pair of scissors to, what at that time already was one of the most costly books in the world; her brand new first edition copy of Audubon’s “Birds of America” ... cut out the nicest specimens and simply had them glued on to her walls.

"A Dining Room" was executed at the Amsterdam studio.
and installed  in October 2022.