Image: Templon, Paris
Templon will present ‘Permanent Display’, Robin Kid’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, at its Paris Beaubourg location from September 5 through October 31, 2026. The exhibition introduces the artist’s new ‘LIFE’ series alongside a focused selection of works from the past decade, examining how social media, artificial intelligence, advertising, news and popular imagery reshape private and collective memory.
At the centre of the exhibition are works that combine silkscreened, milled-aluminum cereal boxes with layered paintings on linen canvas mounted on aluminum panels. The images are drawn from visual material already shaped by reproduction, including television broadcasts, news media, advertising, cowboy films and social media. In this process, disposable consumer packaging becomes a permanent display structure, while familiar images appear in successive states of legibility and erosion.
Templon’s presentation describes ‘LIFE’ as a body of work developed by Robin Kid over several years. Its conceptual starting point is a lyric from The Doors’ 1968 song ‘The Unknown Soldier’: ‘Breakfast where the news is read, television children fed, bullet strikes the helmet’s head.’ The line brings together domestic routine, mass media, advertising and political violence in a single everyday scene—an arrangement that the exhibition connects to the continuing flow of information, entertainment, advertising and conflict through shared image streams.
The new series is arranged in serial formations that recall both supermarket shelving and minimalist repetition. Through repeated appearances, figures and scenes are detached from their original contexts and become fragments of a visual vocabulary circulated internationally. Cowboys, suburban settings, television broadcasts and domestic rituals return not as straightforward historical documents, but as images whose meanings shift each time they are reproduced.
The exhibition’s account of Kid’s practice links this concern with mediated imagery to his childhood in a small Dutch mining town next to an American military base. From his family’s garden, he could see a recreated American suburb built for US military families but could not enter it. At home, television supplied another version of America through cowboys, cartoons, commercials, sitcoms and the evening news. The proximity between the suburb beyond the fence and the images on the television screen continues to inform his work.
Robin Kid, also known as The Kid, is described by Templon as a self-taught multidisciplinary artist of Dutch descent. His work draws on advertising, the internet, the entertainment industry and childhood memories, combining social, political and traditional imagery from the past and present. The gallery characterizes the resulting narratives as rebellious, religious, fantastical and, in some cases, deliberately offensive.
‘Permanent Display’ will be on view at Templon Paris — Beaubourg, 30 Rue Beaubourg, Paris, from September 5 to October 31, 2026. The gallery lists regular opening hours as Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 7pm, with the exhibition opening on Saturday, September 5, from noon to 8pm.
