Although there’s no official count, the amount of World War II bunkers, battery platforms, and other structures found along European coastlines probably number in the tens of thousands. The structures were typically made of concrete, and many are located along what’s known as the Atlantic Wall, an extensive coastal network of defenses built by the Nazis between 1942 and 1944 in anticipation of attacks by Allied forces. Disused now for decades, they’re a blight on the landscape, but one that The Wa sees as a blank canvas for something much more playful and bright.
In his series A Kid Could Do It, The Wa transforms otherwise nondescript structures into jubilantly youthful drawings, literally scribbling in saturated colors and adding blocky windows, doors, and flowers. The title of the project, of course, will sound familiar to any artist working in abstraction or museum-goer who has stood looking at a Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline painting and heard someone nearby murmur derisively, “My kid could do that.”
The Wa turns the table on this sentiment, including in a large-scale rendition on an empty house in Stuttgart as part of this year’s PFFFestival. We encounter windows with purple curtains in seemingly random places, a door that’s narrower on the bottom than the top, a roof with scalloped shapes that could be shingles or clouds, and of course, huge scrawls of bright blue and red.
For PFFFestival, as with his earlier bunker paintings, the artist follows what he describes as “one simple rule: the unfiltered creative logic of a child.” A Kid Could Do It also nods to the collaborative nature of how the project began, as The Wa started the series by working alongside his mother. In a manner of speaking, a kid really did do it.
See more on The Wa’s Instagram.
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