little soldiers 01, 2023
oil on Belgian linen
60 x 80 cm (23,6 x 31,5 inches)
little soldiers 01, 2023 (detail)
oil on Belgian linen
60 x 80 cm (23,6 x 31,5 inches)
little soldiers 02 (detail), 2025
oil on Belgian linen
100 x 150 cm (39,4 x 59 inches)
The series Little Soldiers reframes childhood playthings as charged cultural objects. At life-size scale, the painted figures, based on East European toys from the 1980s, emerge not as decorative miniatures but as full presences.
Each diptych stages a pair. In one, a male soldier faces a mermaid: a juxtaposition of combat and allure, aggression and mythologized femininity. In another, a toy monkey is set against a plush creature: an ambiguous animal-like proxy, somewhere between mascot and projection. The figures are not animated by narrative. They do not act. They endure.
The biographical undertow is implicit but decisive. Growing up under a system of ideological education including Wehrunterricht (*1) in East Germany, meant early exposure to disciplinary and paramilitary logic.
The toys of that era, often hand-painted and mass-produced, served as silent. Yet in the paintings, their function shifts. Enlarged, isolated, and painted with restrained realism, they resist instrumentalization. They appear watchful, damaged, unsure.
Rather than celebrating the toy as an object of nostalgia or critique, the series approaches it as a psychological carrier: of adult projection, childhood ambiguity, and latent affect.
The paintings preserve the imperfections: misaligned eyes, faded pigments, asymmetrical forms. What results is a form of unintentional expression, neither satirical nor sentimental. A face becomes a mask.vectors of normalization.
These are not illustrations of ideology, but portraits of what remains after its collapse. The works propose no resolution; only the recognition that even the smallest figures carry history.
Technical note:
Each painting in the series is based on a plastic or textile toy figure, observed and scaled up to life-size proportions. The original hand-painted irregularities of the toys (often imprecise, expressionistic) are preserved without correction.
Research sources:
1 Wehrerziehung in der DDR. (only in German)
In: Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia,
URL: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrerziehung#Wehrerziehung_in_der_DDR
sad toy soldier (NVA),
source unknown
paramilitary education in the former GDR,
source unknown
old „Pionier“doll,
source unknown