What fascinates you about app icons ?#

The reason for this is that otherwise I’d have to shove my smartphone in people’s faces and say, “Look at this.” Besides, this way I can show it off better. And the whole thing is a work of art in its own right. The colourful square acrylic paintings depict the diverse world of apps. Everyone who’s ever been to one of my exhibitions has been fascinated by them.

How do you decide which icons to create next ?#

I have a to-do list that just keeps getting longer. On F-Droid, I recently had 900 apps installed on my smartphone, and on top of that, I’d browse the catalogue every day for new apps I could paint and add them to the to-do list. And there are also people who write to me asking for this or that app logo as an acrylic painting. I can’t paint the whole catalogue – not financially, and not because of space. For now, I just note everything down on the to-do list. It may be that I paint some things and not others. Some I paint straight away, others take a long time before I get round to them. So it depends on the time available and the paints; occasionally I also buy extra acrylic paints.

Is there an icon that has particularly challenged you when painting and why ?#

When I first started painting, it was ‘Gadgetbridge’. This is the painting that appeared on the square invitation flyer for my first exhibition in Berlin in 2020, which is still open to the public. There are certainly more; I have now painted over 1,200 acrylic paintings.

And here’s why. It all started with the exhibition in Berlin. Berlin. Exhibiting in Berlin. It wasn’t just a shop window display or putting a few pictures on show in a small town. It was in Berlin. I had to make my mark from the outside. And in hindsight, I was celebrated. A total of 150 visitors attended the exhibition opening in Berlin. That’s how it all began.

How do people react to your work at exhibitions? Are they more nostalgic, curious or surprised ?#

-Berlin (since 28 August 2020) – curious

-Dresden (1 September 2022–31 December 2022) perhaps nostalgic, no information available

-Meissen (July 2023) curious

-Meissen (1 September 2023–31 December 2023) curious

-Zwickau (since 23 September 2023) curious

-Radebeul (13 April 2025) curious

-Radebeul (28 September 2025–31 January 2026) curious and surprised

What role does the 1:1 scale play for you? Was that a deliberate choice or more of a natural starting point ?#

In fact, it’s a deliberate concept. It’s all about recognisability. You see an acrylic painting in an icon pack or at exhibitions, and most of the time it looks exactly the same. Sometimes I only painted the background, without the app icon. I did that on purpose. And because it’s not just about the 1:1 scale here, but also about the size. When I started, in October 2018, I was still painting in several formats. 20x20 were for app icons, whilst I painted projects and Linux distributions on 24x30 and so on. But when it came to exhibitions, the gallery owners told me that they would then be able to exhibit fewer acrylic paintings, and since then I’ve been painting almost everything on 20x20 canvases.

Are there any app icons that you deliberately avoid drawing because they seem too mundane, too complex or too sacred to you ?#

What do you mean, too sacred… well, I did design a Bible app logo back in 2025, though only for my F-Droid Acryl icon pack. It no longer exists here on my end. And yes, I also deliberately don’t draw app icons, for example, if the name of the app in question changes every 1 to 2 weeks. Why a developer would do that – I have no idea. I find that suspicious. Then there are apps that I can’t reconcile with my conscience, such as Petals With Petals, you can track your cannabis use. The app description says that you can use it to help you quit, or you can simply log how much you usually consume. You can see the good and the bad in everything. I wouldn’t paint something like that. Okay, it might (perhaps) end up in an icon pack. But I wouldn’t put it on display, and canvases and paint cost money, especially for an app like that. And then there are the programmers (and even some organisations) – hard to believe, but they’ve actually insulted me. And there are also those that are only available in commercial stores. Naturally, I don’t paint those app icons either. The developer of Conversations would also be delighted to receive acrylic paintings of his apps, but he says he always has the final say, which is why I never painted his app logos. And a club from Freiburg had insulted me.

If you were to design your own icon to represent your art? What would it look like?#

Like the app logo from Mondstern Acrylic Icons A self-portrait. Moon and stars.

Thank you for your questions. @mondstern

I had the interview with Sven Owsianowski, Bobaro