Since childhood, Xavi Bou has had a great interest in nature. Growing up in El Prat de Llobregat, on the outskirts of Barcelona, allowed him to go on countless walks with his grandfather, who was also a bird lover. This passion remained with him even after his studies of geography and photography, and during his time working in the fashion industry. 

In 2015 he started “Ornithographies”, his photographic project, as a result of his great admiration for birds and nature. These photographs capture in a single image the shapes that birds generate when they fly, making the invisible visible. 

From the outset, “Ornithographies” caught the attention of collectors and international publications, and since then his work has been published in National Geographic, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Geo and Sonntag, among many others, and he has exhibited in Australia, Holland, the United States, Spain, Switzerland, France, Russia and Greece.

“Xavi Bou sees himself as a “curator” who tracks down the choreography of birds and makes it visible.” Very rarely, therefore, landscapes or cloud formations in the sky remain visible on the monochrome image backgrounds at the bottom of the picture and may hardly contribute to deciphering the actual image subject without relevant background knowledge.

The amazing geometry, precision, and complexity of the birds’ flight figures have been occupying the 43-year-old artist for around ten years now, and many of the cooperation partners for his artistic work are recruited from the bird world, or rather tracked down. Sparrows, swallows, swifts, seagulls, starlings, but also flamingos or eagles as well as other birds of prey… He finds them not only in the wild – very often nearby or even in places like Gibraltar or Iceland – but surprisingly also in the Gracia quarter in the heart of Barcelona”.

Read the text →

– Uta M. Reindl.  Professor, translator, critic and art curator