Biography
Robin Kid (b. 1991) is a self-taught Dutch artist whose practice unpacks the seductive violence of American iconography, mass media conditioning, and consumer spectacle. Working across sculpture, painting, and installation, his work interrogates the architecture of belief built by pop culture—from childhood entertainment to televised trauma.
Raised in a post-war mining town in the south of Holland, Kid grew up in a uniform row of working-class houses where the only distinctions were the names on the mailboxes. He was raised primarily by his grandparents: his grandmother’s family once housed American soldiers, while his grandfather and siblings were deported to Nazi Germany for forced labor. History wasn’t abstract, it was woven into everyday life. It lived in furniture, in folded laundry, in dinner table conversation.
Just beyond that inherited narrative was another: America, beamed in through TV sets, VHS tapes, and—quite literally—over the fence. As a child, Kid stared into the U.S. Army base behind his yard: rows of white houses, picket fences, and a commissary stocked with MAD Magazines, PlayStation games, and supersized snack foods. A sealed fragment of suburban America, complete with its own myths and merchandise. The base became a kind of mirage—close enough to see, impossible to enter. That collision between postwar Europe and exported fantasy—between proximity and exclusion—desire and critique—would shape the core of his work.
Kid left school at 14 and moved first to the U.S., then Paris. He taught himself to draw with Bic pens, sculpt with silicone, and paint through years of experimentation, YouTube tutorials, and relentless trial and error. He worked odd jobs—McDonald’s, retail, construction. His first installations took shape in his grandparents’ attic and garage; today, they unfold at industrial scale. His works—often large-scale hybrids in die-cut aluminum, oil paint, and cast stainless steel—mimic the forms of billboards, roadside shrines, or broken-down stage sets. Each piece functions like a haunted billboard: seductive, cartoonish, and slightly deranged. His visual language fuses the influence of Rosenquist, Wesselman and early Jim Dine with the speed, texture, and sampling logic of MTV and Michel Majerus. Kid’s aesthetics may be slick, but the content stings—consumer desire, social conditioning, state power, childhood fantasy—a cartoon smile stretched over a loaded gun
Kid’s work speaks to a generation raised under the glow of American media and the fallout of its disillusionment—Columbine, 9/11, the Patriot Act, economic collapse reframed as empowerment. His practice reflects the world America built in its image: one of collapsing boundaries, where branding becomes belief, history becomes entertainment, and the show goes on even when the set has fallen apart.
Though fluent in the visual codes of American consumer culture, Kid’s gaze is resolutely that of the outsider. Not quite European, not quite American, he works from the borderlands—of identity, geography, and genre. His practice operates like a forensic probe into media memory: excavating symbols, reassembling narratives, and exposing the ideological scaffolding behind the image. Beneath the surface lies a persistent question: what happens when the illusion breaks, and we keep watching anyway?
Kid’s art doesn’t seek resolution—it dwells in the dissonance between myth and memory, image and ideology, spectacle and subjectivity. Though rooted in the bright surfaces of consumer culture, his work tears into the machinery behind the smile, revealing the emotional residue of propaganda, how symbols mutate, how fantasies curdle, and how belief persists long after the dream has collapsed. The result is a practice that maps the psychic architecture of late-capitalist life—where identity is assembled through screens, history is rebranded in real time, and the spectacle doesn’t end, it just reloads.
THE KID : I Believe In The Promised Land. Group Show. December 5 - 9, 2019. Art Basel Miami Beach art week. The Pulse Exhibition. With the ALB Gallery. Miami Beach (FL), USA.
LIBERTY, LIBERTY DARLING. Group Show. June 27 - September 15, 2019. Curated by Simone Dibo-Cohen, President of The Mediterranean Union For Modern Art UMAM (founded by Henri Matisse & Pierre Bonnard in 1946). Work by THE KID exhibited: TOO YOUNG TO DIE?. Nice New Alpes-Maritimes Regional Museum. The old harbor, Nice.
HEY! CONTEMPORARY #4. Group Show. March 22 - August 03, 2019. Curated by Anne&Julien chief editors of Hey! Art Magazine. Work by THE KID exhibited: THE KID : RISE AND RISE AGAIN UNTIL LAMBS BECOME LIONS. Paris City Museum La Halle Saint Pierre. Montmartre, Paris.
THE KID : NOT NORMAL. Group Show. June 15 - June 20, 2019. Basel Art Fair. Volta Show. With the ALB Gallery. Basel, Switzerland.
THE KID : OUR MEAT IS USA CHOICE. Solo Show. February 02 - March 02, 2019. Paris Le Marais New Art District. The ALB Gallery. Paris.
THEY WERE, THEY ARE, THEY WILL BE. Group Show. January 10 - February 16, 2013. ALB Gallery. New Art District. Paris.
