AN eccentric artist incubated 10 chicken eggs with his body heat for three weeks before hatching nine chicks.
But Abraham Poincheval, 44, who famously spent a week living under a rock and two weeks inside a bear sculpture, has angered PETA with the stunt.
The animal rights group said the French artist was being irresponsible because the chicks wouldn’t have a mother hen.
Poincheval began imitating a mother hen by incubating some 10 eggs with his own body heat inside a glass box at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo contemporary art museum.
He spent three weeks sitting on a chair wrapped in an insulating blanket over a container with the eggs.
He could leave his seat for no more than 30 minutes a day for meals and was exhausted by time the chicks hatched.
A spokeswoman for the museum said the nine chicks were doing well.
The artist’s father has made them a luxury hen house on his Normandy smallholding where they will live out their natural lives and not be slaughtered for food.
But PETA is not happy.
A spokesperson said: “There is nothing to celebrate in the birth of these chicks born alone in a museum.
“Animals have no place in art.”
A museum spokesman said that although the artist was exhausted after the marathon performance he was “very happy”.
As well as having to spend 23-and-a-half hours a day sitting on the eggs, Poincheval had to contend with the heat, having to keep the eggs at a minimum of 37 degrees Celsius or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
The artist is no stranger to bizarre performances.
He once spent a two weeks inside a stuffed bear eating worms and insects, was buried under a rock for eight days and navigated France’s Rhone river inside a giant corked bottle.
His big dream, however, is to walk on the clouds.
“I have been working on it for five years, but it is not quite there yet,” he said.
