Robin Kid’s “Kingdom of Ends” series, exhibited at Templon in Paris, explores the intersection of personal and cultural memories. Using stainless steel, aluminum, and oil painting, Kid creates immersive artworks that evoke childhood hopes and dreams while addressing contemporary fears of insecurity. Influenced by artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine, these hybrid works challenge traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture. Robin Kid is a multidisciplinary artist, who draws on diverse imagery to provoke thought and question the complexities of the 21st century.
Robin Kid. Kingdom of Ends / Templon, Paris. October 20, 2023.
–– Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text:
For his second solo show in Paris with Templon, Robin Kid is coming back to the Grenier-Saint-Lazare space with his new series « Kingdom of Ends », taking over the entire gallery to create an immersive experience consisting of painting, sculpture and installation, all centering around a two-story high mobile.
Through the evocative poignancy of mass-produced foundational imagery depicting our commonly shared childhood, Robin kid is delving into the notion of personal and cultural memories, conjuring up feelings of uncertainty but also of the most naive hopes and dreams gathered during childhood and teenage years.
By combining stainless steel panels and aluminum sculpture with oil painting in a toylike way, the artist is manufacturing an idealized billboard to our shared desire while operating in the context of power and control; Borrowing its title « Kingdom of Ends » from Kant’s ethical principle, the work explores our collective need and hope for a secure existence -and the fear that in Today’s world many might never attain it.
Influenced by Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” and Jim Dine’s early works like “Lawnmower” and “Child’s Blue Wall” – the Kingdom of Ends series are hybrid works, neither painting nor sculpture, but both at once. They invade the viewer’s space, demanding its attention and instigate a dialogue by simultaneously becoming eye-popping and menacing yet perfectly balanced advertisements, invoking a nostalgia so strong it amounts to an ache, for they show us a time and place of which we are and always have been exiled from.
Robin Kid (b. 1991), is an autodidact multidisciplinary artist from Dutch descent. His works hijack 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 the polarized world of the 21st century.
