Kip is pleased to present Birds, a solo exhibition by Dorus Tossijn, hosted at DKUK. It comprises Cocks (2024), 431 prints of pencil drawings depicting male chicken varieties, which tile the walls and keep multiple series of oil on linen paintings under their wings, alongside the memetic Birds (2021-2025) in the salon’s central axis.
The manakin moonwalks across a mossy log, a rooster waltzes, and the bowerbird flaps its wing-cape like a matador. Whether it be through song, impressive plumage, or displays of prowess; birds have found many ways of outdoing each other when it comes to their mating rituals. These behavioural quirks do not necessarily follow the logic put forth by Charles Darwin’s famed ‘survival of the fittest’ principle.
These birds show that evolutionary adaptation has various driving forces, natural selection being one, but there is also a distinct role for beauty and ornamentation. Alongside competition, these are qualities that Darwin wrote about as sexual selection. This part of his evolutionary theory has always been more heavily contested, not least as it places an emphasis on desire and female choice; something unfathomable to some of his Victorian peers.
It is no coincidence that the term ‘peacocking’ is used to describe comparable social behaviour in humans. Embellishment, for example through the right clothes, a flashy car, carefully chosen social media posts, can all be used to stand out from others when dating or making friends. Whilst the word is used across all genders, for the peafowl itself it’s only the males who have an evolutionary need to court females. As a result, where the peahen is a sleek patterned brown-crème, the peacock has gone all out with its metallic blue-green plumage, shrieking calls, and extravagant eye-spotted tail feathers that it is able to pop open like an umbrella. By extension, for Man with Three Parrots, 1 and 2 (both 2021-2025) and Plantlover (2021-2025) are part of Tossijn’s series of men whose source images are appropriated from all over the internet. Their chosen bright adornment could be straight out of the conspicuous peacock’s playbook.
Gregarious by nature, the nomenclature of chickens has long been woven into slang language surrounding sex and gender; chicks and cocks. So much so, that the term rooster was introduced in North America and Australia as a puritanical euphemism, to steer away from overt sexual connotations. Over the course of a year, Tossijn has drawn every variation of male chicken that he could find. These cocks have largely evolved into their distinct breeds by one other evolutionary force; artificial selection, more commonly known as selective breeding. Humans started domesticating these birds as poultry to obtain animal products as far back as the late Neolithic era. The breed names depicted alongside each bird give clues of regional variations and interbreed mixing, mapping out how humans have gained the humble chicken for its eggs, feathers, meat, fighting ability or for purely aesthetic reasons all across the salon’s walls.
Cutting across this is a series of eleven small oil on linen paintings, each depicting the same COS model. Unlike the manakin bird, this mannequin's purpose is to show off the full range of t-shirts on offer without him outshining the product he needs to sell. A tightrope of uniformity with a twist; another form of selective multiplying.
The quadrant chart Birds (2021-2025) started life as an internet meme. According to its author, a cockatoo might outsmart a cockatiel but the latter is the one you’d rather hang out with. The word meme is another concept we owe to Darwin, with the term being coined in the mid 1970s to describe units of culture and their evolution in the Darwinian sense. A meme, like a gene, is a selfish replicator whose success is dependent on qualities of ‘fitness’ and preference in order to be copied and passed on.
A meme can travel, multiply and adapt at lightning speeds across the internet. Tossijn explores this fast-paced current image making culture through processes of slow painting and meditative drawing. Repetition with variation is key. Often working serially—ranging from fingernail sized miniatures to large format—he questions what we decide is good or beautiful.
Dorus Tossijn (b. 1984, The Netherlands) is a London based artist mainly working in painting and drawing. Recent exhibitions include Swimming at Grimm, Amsterdam (2024); Oh Sandy, why did you leave me all alone at Anton Kern, New York (2023); Play with it at Huntington Estate, London (2021); Spider Pig, Pig the Spider at South London Gallery, London (2021); and That’s so Gay at SET, London (2019). Tossijn holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts and a BA from ArtEZ.
DKUK has been creating great hair in front of art since 2014. A salon with a difference, DKUK has redefined the hairdressing experience to make it more relaxing—an inclusive and welcoming space where you can get your hair done without having to sit in front of a mirror.