Gold-Plated Returnables; LAPIZ Paints The Price of Growing Old

There are certain images that tell you almost everything about the era you are living in before you even finish looking at them.

Lapiz. __Retirement. Detail. Saxony, East Germany. (photo © Lapiz)

This latest intervention by Lapiz, painted inside the crumbling shell of an abandoned electrical substation near Chemnitz, lands somewhere between bitter social observation and deadpan advertising parody. Painted amid the remains of East Germany’s industrial skeletons — relics of a promised workers’ utopia that gave way to a turbocharged free-market reality after reunification — Lapiz gives us a satiric scene only slightly exaggerated from those now familiar across much of Europe: elderly citizens rummaging through trash for returnable bottles and cans to supplement pensions that no longer cover the cost of survival.

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