Dutch artist Stefan Thelen, better known by his moniker Super A, creates hyperreal murals and studio paintings that explore the world of human contradiction. Through the combination of realistic and surreal imagery, Super A is often dealing in visual metaphor and social messaging, questioning the ideologies and cultural myths we’ve become too complacent at accepting without critique. Interested in the interrogation of objectivity and its ultimate exposure as a construct, Super A combines elements of realism with the free reign of fiction to produce unexpected results.
Atypical is Thinkspace’s fourth solo presentation of Super A’s work. His well-established alias is a creative alter identity created to explore more contentious and difficult subject matter as a muralist in the public sphere. His most recent body of works in the ’Trapped’ series sees the artist stripping cartoon, fairytale, or pop cultural archetypes of their fantasy and veneer, revealing the realistic or historical counterparts beneath them. An apt commentary on the dissimulation of popular cultural mythology, Super A deconstructs its theater. Atypical is an important next step in the artist’s evolution as this new series of works see’s Super A introducing two new ongoing series to his oeuvre. With the sculpture series ’Two Weeks’, the Netherlands based creative unveils new three dimensional works inspired by the iconic TSA type security scene in the original ’Total Recall’ film from 1990.
Along with ’Two Weeks’, Thelen has also set out to create an entirely new director for his works on canvas. With his new ’Twisted’ series, he aims to showcase how everyday house hold pets / animals have worked their way into popular culture as a whole and the zeitgeist of the last several decades of the human experience.
Super A is a mystery that leans on the art doing most of the talking for Stefan Thelen, taking the viewer into a wonderland walking down a yellow brick road in which Thelen’s figurative and modern surrealist compositions are providing playful puzzles to decipher.
