Templon New York to present Searching For America, an immersive exhibition of new works by Robin Kid, which will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
Today, I think the only honest thing for me to do, is to refuse the pressure of being in a constant state of projected happiness and instead acknowledge that our world is fucked up and that we are driving straight off the cliff.
Robin Kid
We live in an era of mass culture and a society of ceaseless consumption, our identities are being formed and transformed by the content we watch, the headlines we scroll, the advertising we assimilate and the algorithms we are targeted and framed by.
As the 21st century kicks off with a rocky start this narrative has only increased in intensity, distinctions now seem to be blurred, propaganda is blending with news, church with state, brands have melted with art and perhaps we can no longer distinguish one from the other.
Robin Kid’s new show Searching For America is a wide-eyed, provocative – and sometimes even offensive – journey through a multitude of different “Americas”, from the one that comforts to the one that worries, from the one that creates to the one that destroys. Through his work the artist dives headlong into the maelstrom of American iconography as an export, the kind of imagery that programmed the morals, fears and expectations for generations worldwide. Paintings, sculptures and installations are filtered through a European sensibility and serve as a fascinating exploration of a culture that is both immediately familiar and thoroughly alien but which influence leaves no-one untouched.
By conjuring up feelings of uncertainty but also of our most naive hopes and dreams gathered during our formative childhood and teenage years, Robin Kid illustrates how our collective consciousness through programmed memories can serve as an allegory for History at large, addressing larger social and political issues, whether directly or abstractly. This perspective highlights the fluid and sometimes fictional nature of our understanding of the past and our expectations for the future.
Fascinated by the power of consumer spectacle, Robin Kid seizes upon the vocabulary of billboard advertising – with its thrills of big planes of color, giant slogans that invade your life and its overall promise that “the future can only be better” – as a way of expressing the disillusionment felt by today’s youth and addresses the hypocrisy which feels prevalent in the present landscape.
By combining die-cut stainless steel panels with oil paintings and aluminum sculptures in a playful toylike manner, the artist is manufacturing an idealized billboard to our shared fears and desires while operating in a context of power and control.
Influenced by the works of James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” or Jim Dine’s early works like ‘lawnmower’ and ‘child’s blue wall’, Robin Kid’s new pieces are hybrids, neither painting nor sculpture, but both at once. They invade the viewer’s space, demanding its attention and instigate a dialogue by becoming eye-popping and menacing yet perfectly balanced advertisements, invoking a nostalgia so strong it amounts to an ache, for they might show us a time and place of which we are and always have been exiled from.
Robin Kid, Searching For America, September 4th – October 26th, 2024, Templon New York
About the artist
ROBIN KID (b. 1991), is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Dutch descent. Raised by his grand parents in a post war little mining town in the rural south of Holland, Robin had difficulties fitting in at school and preferred to rush home to find his refuge in front of the American programs on TV. From re-runs of Davy Crocket, music videos on MTV to explosive fights on Jerry Springer and the commercials in between, Robin was mesmerized by the spectacle and power of American consumerism. After dropping out of high school and a short-lived career at Mc Donalds, he decided he would teach himself to paint and sculpt through YouTube as a way to navigate today’s world by drawing on the one of his childhood. His work hijacks a variety of social, political and traditional imagery of the past and present, with rebellious, religious, fantastical and in some ways offensive undertones. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, the entertainment industry and his childhood memories, to produce ambitious, enigmatic and thought-provoking narratives, which question our polarized world of the 21st century.
In parallel, Robin Kid’s solo exhibition The Future Is Old is on view at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art MOCO in Barcelona following his three-year solo exhibition at MOCO Amsterdam, and his monumental sculpture The State We Are In, In The Consciousness Of A Country’s Empty Mind as well as four paintings by the artist are on view at the Twenty-First Century Museum 21C in Louisville as part of the group exhibition This We Believe after its three-year exhibition at the 21C Museum in Chicago.
ROBIN KID works are part of public, corporate and private collections in Switzerland, France, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, China, South Korea, the UK and the USA.
