"Toys for Adults" (2025)Oil painting
by Nina Grigel

"Toys for Adults" is a visual reflection on the traps people create for themselves and how easy it is to mistake a beautiful illusion for real life.
The painting creates a whimsical and allegorical world, balancing between surrealism and social satire.
It is a parable about the adult world, where genuine feelings and natural desires are replaced by surrogates. The "toys" here are social masks, the pursuit of status symbols (the toad), an artificially constructed reality (the beaded cloud), and infantile hobbies (the ceramic duck), all of which distract from deeper existential questions. The swamp becomes a metaphor for routine, comfortable stagnation, and the illusions in which a person can become mired.

Series: "Baby, It's Just the End to Start Again"

What if we were shown that the end is not a finish line, but a door? This series of works offers precisely this perspective. It is a journey to the border, where the ruins of the old world become the foundation for the new.
I invite us to let go of the fear of finality and see in it a magical threshold beyond which a new reality is born.
"Baby, it's just the end..." is both a whisper and a battle cry. It is a reminder that every destruction carries within it the seed of future creation.
Through a series of paintings, I explore the alchemy of transformation: how pain turns into experience, how clarity is born from the ashes of doubt, and how infinite potential arises from emptiness.
Find inspiration for your own "beginning."

Materials used:

Oil on canvas, removable beaded element on magnets.

Details:

• Oil painting on Canvas
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 95 x 95 x 2cm (unframed)
• Ready to hang
• Signed on the front
• Style: Unspecified
• Subject: People and portraits