Bombus sp.
in Life Forms 2026

Bombus sp. · Fiurdelin · selected for Life Forms 2026, Gallerium international online exhibition

Bumblebee botanical illustration is a particular kind of problem. The animal is so embedded in cultural shorthand — yellow stripes, round body, universally friendly — that drawing an honest one means spending a long time looking past the cartoon. Somewhere in the process of making Bombus sp., that moment arrived. The work was subsequently selected for Life Forms 2026, an international juried exhibition by Gallerium running online from 11 April to 11 June 2026. No regrets about the fur.

Fiurdelin’s Bombus sp. bumblebee botanical illustration has been selected for Life Forms 2026 — an international online juried exhibition by Gallerium running 11 April to 11 June 2026, with works appearing on Artsy for global collector reach.

Drawing Bombus —
Past the Familiar

The difficulty with a bumblebee is not the anatomy. The difficulty is the cultural weight of the image. Bumblebees have been depicted so consistently as round, friendly, slightly cartoonish creatures that the actual animal — its compound eyes, the precise geometry of the wing venation, the corbiculae on the hind tibiae loaded with pollen — is almost invisible behind its own reputation.

The Bombus sp. illustration approaches the subject the way any natural history drawing should: from the specimen outward. The fur is not uniform. It changes density across the thorax, thins at the wing joints, shifts from amber to black in bands that are taxonomically significant rather than decorative. Getting that right takes longer than the rest of the illustration combined. It also produces something that holds up under close attention in a way that a simpler rendering does not.

“The fur is not uniform. It changes density across the thorax, shifts from amber to black in bands that are taxonomically significant rather than decorative.”

The cream background, the handwritten scientific name at the lower left, the precise dorsal view — these are not stylistic choices borrowed from botanical illustration. They are the vocabulary of natural history draughtsmanship, developed over centuries for exactly this purpose: to make something visible that would otherwise be overlooked. Bombus populations across Europe have been declining for decades. Several species are now on the IUCN Red List. A drawing is also a form of attention, and attention is what these animals need.

Bombus sp. · Digital illustration, Adobe Fresco · 2025

Life Forms 2026 —
The Full Spectrum of Living Things

Gallerium has built a consistent programme of international juried exhibitions, with previous shows reaching over four million visitors worldwide. Life Forms 2026 is organised around a deliberately broad invitation — plants, animals, fungi, ecological systems, synthetic beings, the inner landscapes of memory and dream. The phrase in the prospectus that landed hardest was fragility and resilience. That is not a theme I had to find a way into. It is where the work already was.

Selected works appear in the online exhibition at Gallerium, in The Book of Arts publication, and on Artsy — one of the largest international platforms for art collectors. For a piece rooted in natural history illustration, the Artsy reach matters: it puts a bumblebee drawn with the precision of a scientific plate in front of an audience that collects contemporary art, which is precisely the conversation this kind of work should be part of.

The history of botanical illustration is full of moments where scientific rigour and artistic intent met in the same image. Life Forms 2026 is, in its way, an argument that this is still happening — that the tradition is not a period piece but an active practice, and that careful observation of living things has as much to say to a contemporary audience as any other approach to making art.

Natural History Illustration
in a Contemporary Context

There is a version of botanical and natural history illustration that stays safely inside its own tradition — the members’ societies, the specialist shows, the audience that already knows and values this kind of work. That audience is real and important. But it is not the only audience this work deserves.

Being selected for Life Forms 2026 matters for exactly this reason. It places a bumblebee drawn in the classical natural history tradition — methodical, precise, specimen-based — alongside painting, photography, installation, and digital art from artists working in contemporary modes. That juxtaposition is not uncomfortable. If anything, it clarifies something: that the sustained attention required to draw an insect honestly is its own contemporary statement, as much as any more obviously conceptual approach.

This follows the Tokyo exhibitions at Boji hair+gallery in March 2026, where both the Amanita muscaria and Lucanus cervus were selected for simultaneous themed shows. Each exhibition places natural history illustration in a different conversation. The work is the same. The frame keeps changing, and each new frame reveals something the previous one did not.

The Bombus sp. illustration is available as a print from the Fiurdelin collection —
the same work now showing in Life Forms 2026.

Browse the collection →

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