Super Future Kid makes technicolour cartoonish painting, sculpture and installation. On canvas, ultra-smooth textures recall a digital rendering, but in fact are created by hand with spray paint and acrylic. The people in the paintings go about ordinary pastimes. The Notorious D.O.G. (2019) for example shows a man walking a dog, while Goldilocks (2018) depicts a muscly pink woman in a neon green bikini lifting a barbell - prodding archetypes of femininity. 3D works turn a mixture of concrete and papier-mâché into emoji-like faces, nodding to the impact the internet has had on the artist - “I think none of what I make would exist if it weren't for digital culture.”

Born in East Germany during communism, Super Future Kid attests her candy-coated aesthetic to encountering Western consumerism for the first time after the Berlin Wall fell. This nostalgia for childhood and adolescence in the 1980s and 90s manifests in pop-culture references pulled from video games, music, the early internet and children’s toys. In addition, the contrast between East and West carries through to the juxtapositions in her practice at large: “I'm trying to balance forces that simultaneously collide and repel one another. Like something that is equally savage and silent, roaring and soft, gentle and rugged.”

“Thinking back, it's kind of crazy how much those brutally raw pixel graphics of early games captured my imagination.” – Super Future Kid

Super Future Kid

German

Main

Artist