Super A is known for his hyper-realistic and ethereal depictions of metaphorical narratives. Juxtaposing real and surreal figures, Super A’s work creates a strong critique of global and social issues. In exploring his work, we are often confronted with the challenge, or even facade, of individual liberty in the face of injustice and oppression.

In his monumental mural for The Greenway, Super A questions the social, political, and emotional systems that confine our freedom. He illustrates the urgent necessity of breaking free from those confines, like the Barn Swallows pictured, in order to truly live. A looking glass, the glass cloche allows us to examine the invisible societal and structural borders trapping us. In his title, Super A conceptualizes the way these cracks and fissures grow; elucidating how systems can shatter with even the smallest fissure through the raucous vibrations of our unified resistance. The pursuit of freedom is fiercely instinctive; it orders the natural world, moving us from chaos and conflict toward unity and equity.

Materials: Latex and spray paint

Stefan Thelen’s anti-superhero identity Super A is a Dutch artist who uses traditional painting technique and a knack for design to create compositions that manipulate familiar iconography into mind-bending and inquisitive pieces. His alter-ego, Super A is the filter with which the life and observations of Stefan Thelen are distilled down and turn into inspiration. All of his work evolves out of personal experiences or thoughts that grow into concepts which tightrope between fiction and nonfiction. 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.