
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD ? - 2013 - ROBIN KID -sculpture in oil-painted silicone and various materials - H 105 x L 84 x P 56 cm - H 41 1/3 x W 33 x D 22 in - Private collection - USA
First sculpture. Built in a bedroom. It draws from the Columbine shooters—an image burned into the artist’s teenage psyche on the other side of the world. Constructed through YouTube tutorials and held together by instinct, obsession, and hardware store pragmatism. It’s a self-portrait, dressed like a threat. Hoodie, jeans, and a stance you’d pause on a school security camera.
It’s not about worship. It’s about recognition. A generation raised on static-filled news and rerun violence. You don’t have to pull the trigger to feel the recoil. You just have to watch it a thousand times. Press play. Press pause. Repeat.
The figure’s not acting. He’s buffering. Trapped in the space between thought and action. Between kid and killer. There’s no audience, just a surveillance feed. No message, just noise.
This is youth refracted through exported nightmares—a European childhood shaped by late-night news, ripped soundtracks, and pixelated trauma. Identity arrives mediated, mass-produced, and mythologized.
The title isn’t spiritual—it’s bait. Do You Believe in God? as in: do you believe anything still means anything? ...Or on second thought —Maybe the title isn’t a question. It’s a dare.

IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT - XVI - 2020-2021 - ROBIN KID - Oil on canvas, aluminum wall relief - 159 x 348 x 4,2 cm - 62 2/3 x 137 x 1 2/3 in - 21C Museum collection, USA
It’s all your fault is part cartoon, part crime scene. Bugs Bunny, peeled open like a forensic exhibit, lies in state across a draped American flag. His skeleton spills out in pieces—hips, toes, ribs—while he wails upward in operatic grief, a tragicomic martyr of pop culture. A basketball sits near his hollow pelvis, a Nike sneaker pair rests neatly over the stars. The whole tableau floats in front of a blown-up sidewalk scratch that reads SLAYER, like a teenage epitaph scrawled for a dying empire.
The materials feel weightless—like a sticker slapped on reality—but the image hits with dead mass. The sneakers aren’t worn; they’re offerings. The flag isn’t waving; it’s the bed, the shroud, the prop. Everything’s merchandised, unmoored, and staged. It’s patriotism as product placement. Mourning as pop. This isn’t an elegy—it’s a promotional still for a death America refuses to acknowledge.
Behind the Looney Tunes theatrics is a quiet terror: nothing is left to animate the body. The shoes are empty. The cartoon is posthumous. Even the tears feel like a factory setting—dialed up for effect, yet emotionally void. It’s grief caught in a feedback loop, like scrolling through war crimes between sneaker drops and nostalgia memes. It’s mourning as content, tragedy as pop-up ad.
In a moment when flags are weaponized, basketball players are scrutinized like diplomats, and cartoons are rebooted to fix the past, it’s all your fault is a freeze-frame of collapse. Not with a bang, but with branded bones and licensed tears. It doesn’t mourn the American dream—It merchandises the corpse—and hands you the receipt.

Totem B 01 120 BL - 2021 - ROBIN KID - Bronze, stainless steel, automotive paint - 120 x 41,5 x 40,9 cm / 47 1/4 x 16 1/3 in. x 16 1/10 in - 8 + 4 AP - public collections Switzerland & Belgium
Totem B 01 120 BL (2021) presents itself as a modular sculpture. Cast in bronze and coated with matte-black auto lacquer, it mimics a children’s stacking toy—reimagined at human scale as a monument to cultural fatigue. Five elements. One pole. No fixed order. Endless combinations. Rearrangement is encouraged—whether in the original version or the towering 5.5-meter iteration. Stack them, scatter them, rearrange the ruins however you like. It’s interactive—like IKEA for existential dread.
Each component pulls from a different fragment of Western iconography: a blind-eyed Pinocchio with donkey ears; the fossilized rear of a Lamborghini Countach embedded in rock; a thorned crown; a crucified vulture—a corrupted stand-in for the American eagle; and a Martian landscape littered with a discarded SpaceX helmet and glove. Capping it off: a sign that reads like divine gaslighting—GOD NEVER FAILS. IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT.
You can read this as satire, despair, or motivational speaking. That’s on you.
This isn’t a monument. It’s a gaslight with a user manual. Rebuild the delusion. Remix the damage. Make it personal. Eventually, the ritual starts to feel like responsibility, and the wreckage starts to look like home.
The piece doesn’t offer guidance. It offers hardware. It doesn’t moralize—it delegates. Rebuilding becomes ritual. Interpretation becomes labor. In the end, the viewer is left with the familiar double-bind of contemporary life: a sense of agency, paired with the quiet suspicion that it won’t make a difference.
Some altars are built for worship. Others are built for blame.

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS, OH MY - 2024 - ROBIN KID - Oil on canvas on aluminum honeycomb, stainless steel, cast aluminum - H151 x W119 x D18 in - H384 x W302 xD30 cm - dimensions variable
Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!” is a curious line recited by Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow while on their way to see The Wizard of Oz (1939). When they get there, they quickly realize he’s not a powerful magician, but merely a skilled master of mass communication, expert in dressing up lies with a smoke-and-mirrors illusion. Eminem includes the phrase in the lyrics to Untouchable (2017), in which he presents three conflicting perspectives on race relations in America today. The track ends with the critique: “Got you singing this Star Spangled spiel to a piece of cloth that represents ‘the land of the free’ that made people slaves to build.”
Each generation’s achievements are only possible because of the advancements that have been made by those who have come before them. “What has God wrought?” was the first message ever telecommunicated over ‘the wire,’ tapped out by Samuel Morse in 1844; a spiky electric forest soon connected cities from sea to shining sea. In 1889, the New York Times ran an article entitled ‘The War on Telephone Poles’ detailing incidents where the intrusive ‘bare trees’ had been attacked and even cut down. Despite this early hostility to fast communication, the utility poles soon became ubiquitous and the services they delivered essential to maintaining daily life. There are around 150 million still standing.
Sighted during a Route 66 road trip, a lightning-struck telephone pole becomes a readymade American crucifix. A car park tow-away warning sign hangs in the position of the ‘INRI’ carving traditionally found on the cross of Jesus Christ. This placard reads: ‘No Parking for Perverts or Thieves,’ apt when one of the two candidates for executive leadership has been accused of being both. From Morse Code to 5G, the Messiah’s message is now fully electric. After all, ‘power’ is another word for ‘electricity.’
At the foot of the cross, crowded around a single bowl of soup with awe and devotion are a gaggle of freckle-faced children resurrected from an early 1960s ad. Any attempt to turn the youth of today away from telecommunication devices would be futile. Their feed is their ego, their identity, their whole self. They derive sustenance from the glowing screen. Here, easy-heat, pre-packaged soup has transubstantiated into the water and wine that can lead masses away from Mass and into a celebration of the ecstasies of communal consumption (of the image, not the Word). With all of their attention on the ‘meal,’ none of the kids look towards the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, hatchet and studded baseball bat hanging so near to them. They’re not interested in cutting down this tree…
Text by Hannah Bhuiya - extract from the 2024 Walk-through guide

HARDCORE, PRETTY GIRL CEASE TO EXIST - 2024 - ROBIN KID - Oil on canvas on aluminum honeycomb, stainless steel, cast aluminum, tire - H107 x W226 x D83 in - H270 x W573 x D210 cm - Dimensions Variable
“There… the ceremony is over… and the children learned that cars die too” L’Amérique Insolite (1960)
There’s nothing more American than racing down a highway in a fast car, declares the narration of a 1950s American Motors promotional film, engaging in some potent myth-making: “The automobile is America. Nothing devised by the mood of man so epitomizes a nation as does this surging, omnipresent, always go-you-one-better, reproductive miracle on wheels.”
Here, a classic 1959 Chevrolet Belair and a contemporary Tesla are frozen in a mid-air collision, battling it out in their own personal Carnival of Destruction. It’s ironic that an entire civilization based on comfort takes childish pleasure in seeing symbols of that comfort scorned and demolished. The layers of symbolism reverberate; not only is it a clash between the beauty of hand-molded chrome curves and generic computer assisted design, its an age old struggle between the old and the new: the rechargeable battery vs gasoline engine; the glorious mechanical past vs a projected electric future; the eccentric vision of individual entrepreneur Elon Musk vs the prestige legacy of corporate behemoth General Motors.
Cars are not safe, and never have been, but their benefit to society apparently outweighs their inherent dangers and the innumerable deaths they cause on the road every day. As with outmoded systems of governance, we seem unable to come up with any viable alternative. Voters become crash-test dummies for untried and untested policies. One side accuse the other of trying to advance society into a future where humanity is subordinate to technology while the other faction wishes to turn the clock back to the mores and morals of mid-century America - to, as they say, ‘Make America Great Again.’ But there really is no road back.
Even during that time, there were reactions against the notion of America being so ‘great.’ Many in the 1960s rebelled against what they already saw as the defunct systems of the Eisenhower 1950s. They had developed a militant consciousness in college, refused to fight in Vietnam, and critiqued the warmongers who sent their friends there. Kids with ideas in fierce opposition to their square parents who were tired of dull, boring suburbia, hitchhiked across the continent to California in droves. They’d read Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ hear there were cool poets in San Francisco, and wanted to become writers and artists themselves. Some of them ended up being adopted into ‘the Family,’ a loose gathering who gravitated around small-time criminal and musician Charles Manson, or as they knew him, ‘Charlie.’ Crashing in a former movie ranch, they dropped acid, sewing swastikas into patchwork quilts while listening to Manson’s manic speeches on the Apocalypse of a corrupt society to come.
And that is how the ‘Happy Days' of mid-century Americana came to an abrupt end with the Manson murders of late August 1969. The unprovoked horror also marked and end to the carefree, hitchhiking hippy era where a pretty girl knew she could catch a ride wherever she needed to go. Instead of free-love and playing the guitar around the fire, many who arrived in Los Angeles with just a smile were instead lured into the hardcore sex industry, prostitution and drugs, as depicted in the Paul Schrader movie Hardcore (1979), and as Manson himself wrote in a song later adapted by The Beach Boys, (who also erased his writing credit). An entire way of life had, on the turn of a dime, ‘Ceased to Exist.’
Text by Hannah Bhuiya - extract from the 2024 Walk-through guide

CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO GET TO SESAME STREET? -(DETAIL)- 2024 -ROBIN KID-oil on canvas on aluminum honeycomb, stainless steel, cast aluminum - H149 x W158 x D12 in - H380 x W400 x D30 cm Dim.Variable
From Mount Rushmore on, no other country crafts pop culture icons out of their Presidents the way America does. The brick wall backdrop to the composition is cut out from the August 1968 Saturday Evening Post cover, whose headline read ‘WILL AMERICA BURN?’ It shows the campaign posters of competing candidates Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey posted up in a rough inner city neighborhood.
Text by Hannah Bhuiya - extract from the 2024 Walk-through guide

CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO GET TO SESAME STREET? - 2024 -ROBIN KID- Oil on canvas on aluminum honeycomb, stainless steel, cast aluminum - H149 x W158 x D12 in - H380 x W400 x D30 cm Dimensions Variable
1968 the year the world was on fire. 1968 was a tumultuous year in American and world history. Americans were suffering with an identity crisis. They had seen an overflow of police brutality, they had seen riots, and they had seen shootings; Martin Luther King was murdered in April, Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas on June 3rd and a mere 3 days later Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel on June 6th. The war also had entered America’s living rooms and Americans started to realize that they might be the bad guys. It would be the last election year, until 2024 that is, in which the incumbent president was eligible to run again but would not the eventual nominee of their party while facing an opponent, looking to ride the wave of discontent and disillusionment.
1968 was also the year that Sesame Street was conceived, introducing a groundbreaking, inclusive vision to educational broadcasting. It cast authentic ethnic character actors to represent the multicultural population of urban America, interacting with Jim Henson’s muppets like Kermit the Frog or Big Bird who came in all shapes and sizes. Taking advantage of the television in every home, the show used the techniques of advertising (animation, jingles, alluring colors, humor) to effectively ‘sell kids the alphabet.’ Over decades of global syndication, it became a safe haven for countless children and it was to educate millions more.
But in the early 1950s, there was no friendly, funny green puppet to teach children - and their parents - other ways of relating than hatred and prejudice. Ruby Bridges was 6 years old when she was to become the center of the integration storm. Arriving to attend William Franz Elementary School in New Orleans, the little girl had to do so with a U.S. Marshall escort, facing a torrent of abuse from a crowd of angry students and parents. Norman Rockwell’s painting ‘The Problem We All Live With’ captures this moment, although in Rockwell’s version Ruby is walking towards the left, towards progress and social advancements, but in this work the artist chose to turn her around, symbolically walking her backwards.
The lower portion of the frame is cut from press shots of the Capitol Riots of Jan 6th, 2021. As some gathered calling to hang Vice President Mike Pence, holding aloft a makeshift gallows, a female protestor is tackled by riot police, a large ‘Betsy Ross’ flag still in her grasp. With its distinctive thirteen-star circular pattern, it dates from 1777. While many Americans are waiting for a ‘Knight’ in shining armor to ‘clean up’ the country and somehow restore the ideals of the very early years of the founding of the United States - to a time before Civil Rights, universal franchise, andSesame Street - others might see a cleanup of the Supreme juridicial complex as a necessary step towards a more inclusive future.
Text by Hannah Bhuiya - extract from the 2024 Walk-through guide

MR FREEDOM TU DIS DE LA MERDE - 2024 - ROBIN KID - Nitro-acrylic on wood - 45 boards - H63 x W30- 55 xD2 in - H160 x W75-139 x D4 cm - Variable dimensions according to installation
Lower Manhattan’s One World Trade Center is also called the "Freedom Tower” because it stands 1776 feet tall, 1776 as every schoolchild knows, being the year America declared its Independence. The American Republic that resulted from that Revolution is a truly unique experiment in freedom. From inception, its ideals were consciously enshrined in a Constitution that guaranteed citizens freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom to bear arms, and if accused of transgression, the right to fair judicial process. It was a noble beginning. Even if in historical retrospect it was a hypocritical one, given the unfairness of these laws regarding slavery, women and Native peoples’ rights. Almost 250 years later, we’re still debating - what truly is freedom? Who deserves to enjoy it - or grant it?
These issues burst to life in William Klein’s intensely visual 1968 feature film, MR FREEDOM which uses extreme satire to confront the ironies of American imperialism. Exaggerating and parodying the national obsession with superheroes and supervillains, rival global entities are cast as Evil or Good, and the American Embassy in Paris is a functional supermarket. Sent on a mission to France, Mr. Freedom communicates only in ad-speak: “If you got what it takes, we’ll take what you got. And then some.” As costumes and actions get wilder, he and his followers blow up several landmarks in Europe, asserting: “Everything I destroyed, I will rebuild better.” While he never says “Trust me, I’m lying,” that‘s the underlying message of every statement he makes. The provocative work of Pop-art carnage premiered in France in July 1968 before arriving in New York in March 1970, outraging critics.
In one breathless speech, Mr Freedom alternates the buzzwords of his time with hearty bombast: “The sexual revolution, the new frontier, the proposed land, the permanent revolution. Never before on the face of the earth. It’s not for next year, it’s not for tomorrow, it’s for right now! Step right up, it’s free, and its freedom, there is only one freedom, and it’s your freedom and it’s mine, and freedom is Freedom!” His excited young disciples chant, holding placards: “In the name of Freedom! Kill for Love! Kill for Freedom!”
The rally signs also resemble those used at Republican and Democratic Nation Conventions. On some, single capital ‘F’s are arranged on a round shield, à la ‘Captain America,’ others in various shapes bear ‘Freedom’ slogans, stripes and stars in Franco-American Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. One reads: ‘Nouveau C’est Mieux’ - ‘New, it’s better.’ But what if the new is fascism? Fallen to the floor after the rally, their sentiments also seem to be abandoned underfoot.
In 2009, tech billionaire and Presidential campaign sponsor Peter Thiel published an essay where he stated: ‘‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Which means people must abandon either democracy or freedom in their future systems. With 1775’s revolutionary cry, ”Give me liberty or give me death,” in mind, it all begs the question: who is going to own - or perhaps, ‘sell’ - our future Freedom?
Text by Hannah Bhuiya - extract from the 2024 Walk-through guide

IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT - XVIII - 2021 - ROBIN KID - Oil on canvas, aluminum wall relief - 214,5 x 394,5 x 4,2 cm - 83 2/3 x 155 1/3 x 1 2/3 in - Private collection, USA
It’s not a vision—it’s a crash report. Two boys frozen mid-glitch: one headless, the other armored like he’s loading for a boss fight. A vulture wing sticks out where an angel’s should be. Tenderness has a kill screen.
Behind them, the Windowlicker girl’s been copy-pasted into oblivion—three hands, same face, all teeth. She’s not dancing, she’s choosing. Fire eats everything—the car, the console, the sky. A trash cart in the corner spills out fast food bags like artifacts from a lost civilization. The apocalypse, brought to you by drive-thru culture and limited edition merch.
The piece isn’t beautiful. It doesn’t want to be. It’s running on corrupted files: martyrdom, porn, mythology, fashion. There are no saints here—just avatars with bad signal. No emotion, just presets. No truth, just export settings.
This isn’t faith—it’s lag. No redemption. No resurrection. Just respawn. This is belief in the age of distortion. Innocence is drag-and-drop. Beauty is corrupted. There’s no miracle coming, no light at the end. Just one more life, one more skin, one more crash. And heaven? Maybe it’s just another level no one gets to finish.

KINGDOM OF ENDS XI - ( DETAIL) - 2023 - Oil on canvas, cast aluminum, stainless steel - H265 x W205 x D30 cm - H104 x W80 x D11 - public collection Switzerland
“Inside we are all ageless… And when we talk to ourselves, it's the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It’s the body that is changing around that ageless centre.”
David Lynch, Room to Dream, 2018.

KINGDOM OF ENDS VIII - 2023 - Oil on canvas, cast aluminum, stainless steel - H265 x W205 x D30 cm - H104 x W80 x D11 - private collection Belgium
The room is blue. Floor, walls, ceiling—painted like the sky. At each end: a white house. Between them, a picket fence. Not a real neighborhood—just the idea of one. A memory rebuilt from scratch. The installation draws from the artist’s childhood in the Netherlands, where he would peer over his backyard fence at the neighboring U.S. military base: a surreal, gated replica of American life, complete with soda fountains, trimmed hedges, and American flags fluttering on every porch.
That suburban fantasy is rebuilt here, not as nostalgia, but as architecture. A hyper-artificial version of the liminal space between innocence and exposure—between what children are promised and what they quietly absorb. Overhead, Johnny Build a House, a deceptively sweet song by Malvina Reynolds, plays on loop. It sounds cheerful, almost naive, but it’s a song about collapse. Its lyrics tell of a boy constructing a house without walls or floors— too tired, perhaps, to finish the dream. It reads like a parable for a generation that inherited blueprints but no foundation.
The works on display follow the formal logic of the Kingdom of Ends series: billboard-like structures built from stainless steel pegboards and oil paintings mounted on aluminum honeycomb panels. Each one features a die-cut panel spelling out the series title—borrowed from Kant’s ethical ideal—but here, the Enlightenment promise feels short-circuited. Each piece is flanked by cast aluminum weapons—axes, chainsaws, bear traps—fixed like props in a conflict no one talks about.
In one painting, two freckled boys in red caps reach for a pile of sandwiches beside a gleaming piece of Spam—a collective memory sampled from mid-century advertising. In another, a silhouetted child holds up a toy airplane against an orange sunset, suspended in an eternal golden hour. Together, these images evoke a sanitized Americana—eerily perfect, almost animatronic.
Rather than presenting childhood as a lost Eden, this installation exposes it as a surveillance state in miniature: meticulously designed, eerily cheerful, and quietly armed.
A safe place, build for no one.

KINGDOM OF ENDS I - 2023 - Oil on canvas, cast aluminum, stainless steel - H265 x W205 x D30 cm - H104 x W80 x D11 - private collection Germany
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
This verse, whispered by generations of children before bed, occupies a peculiar space in Western culture: part prayer, part incantation, part existential contract. It anticipates death, but in the language of reassurance. In this work from the Kingdom of Ends series, that ambiguity is rendered with clinical precision. A young girl, clad in a pink robe, kneels beside her bed, hands folded. Her dog mirrors her posture. Naturally—he has a soul to keep, too. The scene is staged like a devotional painting—soft, saccharine, over-familiar. Above her: three stylized animals in bright colors. On the floor: a doll, her pink plush slippers. This is not a reconstruction of a moment. It’s a memory of a memory. Innocence is performed, almost too perfectly.
The piece sits within an immersive installation that doesn’t depict childhood so much as reengineer it—as a circulating fiction, not a lived experience. The gallery’s basement was transformed into a labyrinth of faux-wood paneling, heart-shaped doorways, and sky-blue floors and ceilings. An uncanny architecture, modeled less on real space than on the stylized afterimage of one. The air is thick with the warped harmonies of Mr. Sandman, slowed down until the song collapses into texture. The result is neither ironic nor sentimental. It’s infrastructural. A system of images designed to sustain belief.
In the distance, a monumental skull hangs. Cast from a child’s toy, its surface is embedded with rods and chains meant to carry symbolic objects. It doesn’t function as a traditional memento mori, but as a kind of godhead—a mute witness to the child’s whispered prayer. Its presence recalls the vanitas tradition in Western painting, where symbols of youth and beauty are offset by reminders of mortality. Built into the dream. Suspended over the threshold. Holding space for the question: If I should die before I wake… who, or what, is waiting to take my soul?
This is the architecture of liminality. Not a home. Not a memory. Not a fantasy. A system. A holding pattern. A machine for producing belief.

Kingdom of Ends IV - 2023 - ROBIN KID - Oil on canvas, cast aluminum, stainless steel - H265 x W205 x D30 cm - H104 x W80 x D11 in
It looks like an ad, but it’s wired like a trap. This isn’t a memory. It’s a setup. A beautiful one.
Stainless steel, honeycomb panels, weapon-grade nostalgia. Two boy scouts crouch in the foliage, binoculars raised. They’re not lost. They’re watching. In front of them: a cast aluminum bear trap, a spiked bat, and the words “Kingdom of Ends”—cut out like a warning label no one reads anymore.
Everything here is built to seduce and punish. Billboard structure, showroom polish, oil paintings drilled in with cold precision. The aesthetics of safety turned inside out. It’s childhood as surveillance, ethics as display.
Post-COVID, we were promised a softer future. A reset. A Monde d’Après. What we got was marketing spin and collective burnout. This work freezes that disconnect—between what we hoped for and what we’re stuck with. Kingdom of Ends borrows the structure of Rauschenberg’s Combines and Jim Dine’s domestic relics, but strips out the sentiment. These aren’t poetic objects. They’re bait.

Totem B 01 440 BL - ( detail) - 2021 - The Future Is Old - MOCO Museum Barcelona - Solo Show Jan-Nov 2024 - H458 x W152 x D151 cm - H180 x W60 x D60
Cast in bronze and coated in matte-black auto lacquer, the vulture hangs impaled on the totem, its wings outstretched like a crucifix—part martyr, part monument. The posture recalls the aquila, the eagle standard carried into battle by Roman legions and later reappropriated by fascist regimes. Once a symbol of permanence and divine authority, the imperial bird is now stripped of flight and frozen mid-fall. Not just dead—ceremonial. Emptied of function.
A symbol of empire in freefall—rigid, lifeless, and propped up for display. It doesn’t soar, it hangs. Less national pride, more roadkill canonized.

Totem B 01 440 BL - 2021 - The Future Is Old - MOCO Museum Barcelona - Solo Show Jan-Nov 2024 - H458 x W152 x D151 cm - H180 x W60 x D60 - Oil paintings 2018 - 2019 - Moco's permanent collection
Installed at the center of The Future is Old, the artist’s solo exhibition at Moco Museum Barcelona, this 4.5-meter-tall totem anchors the space both physically and thematically. Cast in bronze and coated in matte-black automotive lacquer, the sculpture carries an industrial finish that contrasts sharply with the oil paintings surrounding it. The totem is modular—its elements can be rearranged in multiple configurations—and is presented here in its full-height iteration, encircled by 5 paintings from the 2018 The Future is Old series, part of the museum’s permanent collection.
Though formally based on a child’s stacking toy, the work suggests something more ominous: a discarded plaything built for gods, left behind in the aftermath of belief, power, and progress. Each of the six components draws from a different register of cultural ruin: a blinded Pinocchio with donkey ears; a crucified vulture; the fossilized rear of a Lamborghini Countach; a crown of thorns; the abandoned Space-X helmet and glove from a failed Mars expedition; and, at the top, a sign that reads: GOD NEVER FAILS. IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT. There is no prescribed order. The components are interchangeable. Meaning is provisional, and structure is just a temporary arrangement of debris.
In the context of The Future is Old, the totem operates as both axis and indictment—a monument assembled from myth, crisis, and the aesthetics of collapse. It absorbs the language of power and belief, then fractures it into parts. What remains is a system open to interpretation, reassembly, and, inevitably, failure. It doesn’t promise redemption. It offers you the pieces.

Totem B 01 440 BL - ( detail) - 2021 - The Future Is Old - MOCO Museum Barcelona - Solo Show Jan-Nov 2024 - H458 x W152 x D151 cm - H180 x W60 x D60
The rear of a Lamborghini Countach protrudes from a jagged slab of rock—half buried, half resurrected. Cast in bronze and finished in matte black automotive paint, it reads like a fossilized supercar: speed and spectacle petrified into monument. Once a symbol of ultimate luxury, now an absurd relic.
Above it, a crown of thorns circles the totem’s pole—neither resting nor rising, simply orbiting—a devotional gesture, stripped of faith. In an age where religion returns as political theater, the crown no longer redeems. It intimidates and threatens.
Each element of the totem is impaled on a single vertical shaft—stacked, pierced, suspended by violence as much as by weight. Myth, ideology, aspiration: pinned like specimens, emptied of transcendence, preserved for scrutiny.
In the background, a boy watches from the painting American Pastoral—Nike Airs, dog tags, and a glowing blue 7/11 Super Gulp in hand. Draped in a faded flag, he sits like a martyr of late capitalism. He’s drinking the Kool-Aid—too young to know it, too deep in to stop.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s afterimage. The dream car, the martyr’s crown, the boy-soldier sucking down synthetic sugar in a climate-controlled void. Each one a piece of a system that once promised transcendence, now locked in endless repetition. Progress stalls. Symbols pile up. And the future? Already old.

JOSEPH - 2013 - Bic blue ballpoint pen on paper - H195 x L250 x P6 cm - H76,77 x W98,42 x D2,36 in - public Collection Switzerland
Joseph extends the forensic precision of Bryan and David, but turns inward—away from shared mythologies and toward the solitary collapse of the self under symbolic weight. A young boy bares a swastika tattoo across his chest: an image of inherited violence etched into flesh, not as political statement, but as psychic armor. The gesture—fingers in the mouth, liquid falling—evokes a moment caught between expulsion and compulsion, the body short-circuiting under the pressure of its own signs.
In psychoanalytic terms, the drawing stages a breakdown between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The swastika, emptied of ideology through repetition and incarceration, becomes pure signifier: a mark that functions less as belief and more as symptom. The boy’s body, caught in an ambiguous gesture that could signal vomiting, silence, or oral fixation, resists legibility. He is neither victim nor monster, but a figure trapped in the loop of trauma’s aftermath—where meaning is no longer constructed but compulsively re-enacted.
Drawn entirely in blue ballpoint, the work maintains the obsessive, bureaucratic quality that runs throughout the series. Each line is a record of time passed—marking not just labor, but the grinding repetition of the carceral system itself. In Joseph, the body is not represented so much as indexed: a surface for projection, punishment, and desire, offered up without resolution.

BRYAN & DAVID - 2013 - Bic blue ballpoint pen on paper - H175 x L275 x P6 cm - H68 9/10 x W108 1/4 x D2 1/3 in - Private Collection United Kingdom
Originally presented in the artist’s 2013 debut solo exhibition Endgame, Bryan and David is an expansive ballpoint drawing that captures the psychological weight of incarceration, youth, and nationalism. The show title references both Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame and Marcel Duchamp’s fascination with chess as metaphors for fatalism and strategy—rigid systems with no real escape.
The two figures, drawn entirely in blue ballpoint pen, are based on real minors sentenced to life in U.S. prisons. Their bodies are partially obscured beneath an American flag, which reads simultaneously as protection, punishment, and costume. Tattoos across their chests—“311” and “Don’t cry for tomorrow mummy”—hint at personal histories reduced to code and cliché. There’s no sentimentality here, only the cold intimacy of institutional violence rendered in obsessive detail.
At once portrait and indictment, Brian and David speaks to the aesthetics of control, and the mythology of American justice. The choice of ballpoint pen—a medium associated with school desks, bureaucracy, and low-cost labor—mirrors the slow, compulsive process behind the work. Every inch of the surface is a reminder of time served.

UNTIL THE QUIET COMES 27:19 - 2015 - Sculpture in oil-painted silicone and various materials - H 45 x L 47,5 x P 25,5 cm - H 17 7/10 x W 18 7/10 x D 10 in - Private Collection France
Hyperreal but unreadable. The figure looks real, but nothing moves. A teenage boy frozen mid-load: backwards cap, freckled skin, minor facial damage. Rendered in silicone and oil paint, his chest reads Until the Quiet Comes—which might be a lyric, a warning, or nothing at all.
There’s no action, no setup, no payoff. The violence is ambient—hinted at, never confirmed. He’s just there. A still pulled from a non-existent film, paused forever. Subject, object, avatar. You’re not meant to know him—you’re meant to keep looking, scrolling, consuming. Like an image cached too many times, he’s been stripped of context but never presence. He’s not a character, just content: suspended between flesh and fiction, scanned and stilled for endless viewing.

OUR MEAT IS USA CHOICE - 2019 - Triptych - Oil and egg tempera on canvas - 275 x 600 cm - 108 x 236 in - Private collection USA
Our Meat Is USA Choice reads like a corrupted feed: three large-scale oil paintings suspended between nostalgia, violence, and ad-space. On the left, a flayed carcass—Rembrandt by way of supermarket lighting—hangs in isolation. The painting carries the weight of tradition, but it’s been flattened, reprocessed, downgraded. An sacred image eating its own reference—JPEG of a JPEG.
The middle panel, captured by the artist on an iPhone while driving through Florida, shows a red pickup stalled beneath a glitching sign: “COMPARE / OUR MEAT IS GRADED / USA CHOICE OR GRADE A.” The slogan is scrambled, yet unmistakably American—branding as identity, commodity as gospel.
On the right: a boy in a trucker cap, cheeks sunburnt, veins blooming beneath the skin. His face is marked by a birthmark, or a bruise, or both. He doesn’t pose. He just registers. A screen face. Part porn, part prayer card.
There’s no moral center here—just the ambient hum of consumption, exposure, and low-grade despair. The triptych doesn’t tell a story - neither does it offer critique or redemption.; it switches between channels like early 2000s cable tv—A feed with no beginning, no climax, no exit. It’s a freeze-frame. Raw material, waiting to be processed.

BACK TO SCHOOL - ( DETAIL) - 2017 - SCULPTURE IN OIL-PAINTED SILICONE AND VARIOUS MATERIALS - H 240 x L 310 x P 190 cm - H 94 1/2 x W 122 x D 74 4/5 in - PUBLIC COLLECTION SWITZERLAND

ENDGAME - III - 2013 - Bic blue ballpoint pen on paper - H 52 x L 72 x P 6 cm - H 20 1/2 x W 28 1/3 x D 2 1/3 in - Private collection France

THE MORNING I WAS BORN AGAIN - 2014 - Bic blue ballpoint pen on paper - H 182 x L 332 x P 6 cm - H 71 2/3 x W 130 7/10 x D 2 1/3 in - Private Collection France

GOD IS DEAD - 2012 - Charcoal and oil pencil on paper - H 230 x L 180 x P 6 cm - H 90 1/2 x W 70 9/10 x D 2 1/3 in - public collection Switzerland


"ROBIN KID : KINGDOM OF ENDS" Solo Show - TEMPLON Paris - Sept 02-Oct 21, 2023

ROBIN KID A.K.A THE KID - It's All Your Fault - Solo Show - TEMPLON Gallery
ROBIN KID A.K.A THE KID - It's All Your Fault - Solo Show - TEMPLON Gallery
Preview
Robin Kid (b. 1991) grew up in a working-class Dutch town, staring through a picket fence at an American army base next door—a gated microcosm of suburban freedom, Mickey Mouse, and military power. That impossible closeness—to a dream sold through TV and enforced through power—is at the core of his work.
From hyperreal silicone bodies to cartoon reliquaries in aluminium and stainless steel, Kid constructs monuments to a collapsed belief system—works that operate in the aftermath of image culture. Mass media as memory. Childhood as battleground. Aesthetic as weapon.
Billboards, shrines, theme park ruins—each form serves as a proxy for faith, loss, and entertainment. These are history paintings for the post-broadcast age: salvaged from spectacle, rebuilt as ideological fragments.
The surface seduces. The content disturbs. A visual language assembled from MAD Magazine, televised violence, PlayStation, and propaganda—restructured with the sampling logic of MTV and the weight of postwar memory. Not quite American, not quite European. Somewhere in between: looking in, looking back.
This is not a resolution. It’s the holding pattern. There is no ending, only reruns.
Stay tuned for Robin KID's latest works and exhibitions:


























