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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The meltdown of Europe – as told by toys

Humans enslaved by ATMs, Golden Dawn tooling up, sunbathers surrounded by refugees – and Angela Merkel as a Viking dog-walker. A Greek artist is retelling the European crisis through Playmobil. And the toy company wants him to stop It all started in 2013, when Nikos Papadopoulos was playing with his eldest son John-Marios. “We were pretending to go to bed using Playmobil – and it gave me the idea to recreate scenes not only about home life, but the whole of society,” he says. Since then, the 36-year-old comedy writer from Thessaloniki has become Greece’s latest art star. He’s spent around €900 on Playmobil to make dozens of artworks in his living-room studio. He approaches the work like a satirist – setting up the figurines to express his political opinions (he could be called a visual columnist or a toy cartoonist). He then photographs the dioramas and posts them on his Plasticobilism fan page. Continue reading...


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com