The German street art duo, Low Bros, continue their "retro-futuristic" vibe with a mural for the fifth edition of Heidelberg's Metropolink Urban Art Festival. The two brothers dress up an abandoned US supermarket, combining motifs from PepsiCo, Penn, and Microsoft to riff on commercial branding of our capitalist world.
"The supermarket was the perfect playground for us to implement some of our newest ideas. Recently, we began integrating products into our images to reflect our relationship with brands and their goods. To what extent can art and brands be combined? And, what is our general relationship to the products that surround us daily and are so deeply rooted in our lives?
"These relationships are often ambivalent. We use a product to make us feel good or optimize our lives, but at the same time, it might harm the environment or we're supporting an evil company. We belong to a generation that continues to fear intrusion by branding and maintains the need to protect against commercializing, while the younger generation doesn't see the need to fight. They accept that we already live in a global market place.
"We have always been very much opposed to letting brand names appear in our pictures, even if they are already part of pop culture. With this piece, we explore the limits of compatibility, so it's interesting for us to develop our own brands and brand pieces without any restraint. How does this feel; pleasant or discouraging? And what does that say about our perception in a thoroughly capitalist world?"
Photos Courtesy of the Low Bros, Daniel Schreiber, and Rainer Müller
