2024
Juxtaposing the faces of iconic celebrities with patterns reminiscent of quilting and folk art, Robert Mars (b. 1969) considers the many facets of American popular culture through the lens of advertising.
In Mars’s mixed-media works, brand names are collaged beneath the visages of mid-century stars such as Elvis, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, with neon lighting and shiny coats of resin on wood panels lending each piece the allure of a covetable consumer object.
Born in New Jersey, Mars studied at the Parsons School of Design and worked for a time as a graphic designer. His cultural mash-ups draw on imagery from his collection of vintage magazines. Combining enlarged Xerox transfers and boldly painted colors in several built-up layers, his works recall the messy remixing of everyday objects by Robert Rauschenberg as well as the explorations of mass reproduction and fame by Andy Warhol. The shape of a Chanel No. 5 bottle, a Louis Vuitton logo and a photograph of Audrey Hepburn are all plucked from mass media as relics of Americana and the obsession with luxury. Distressing the surfaces of the pieces, Mars gives them a timeworn texture, like an old advertisement that might be found on the wall of a roadside gas station, but with a surreal quality in their recontextualized subjects.
The stars and mass-media material in Mars’s work mostly have origins in the 1950s and ’60s, an age that saw the rise of celebrity endorsements during a postwar economic boom in which there were plenty of novel new products to promote. An image of Jackie Kennedy is overlaid with ad copy for Dior; a photograph of a victorious Muhammad Ali is joined with Champion Spark Plugs typography. The nostalgia here is for commerce as much as it is for people who became a brand. In the artist’s dynamic collages, the lines between what, or who, is being packaged and sold are blurred.
Mars has produced commissions for Coca-Cola, was a featured artist for a project with Kari Whitman Interiors and was chosen in 2015 for the cover of Neiman Marcus’s May Book. He has exhibited at the Evansville Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art and elsewhere.
Find Robert Mars mixed-media works, paintings and other art on 1stDibs.
Modern
By Greg Miller
Located in Santa Monica, CA
Contextually within the framework of postmodern Neo-pop and Post-pop, Miller utilizes a semiotic process of mining familiar pictorial codes from the popular culture of his youth for ...
Canvas, Paper, Acrylic
Destination Zero
By M. Clark
Located in Brooklyn, NY
- This piece is exceptionally textural and reflective. - The three-quarter-inch edge is foiled in gold, on top of a sintra panel. - M. Clark uses an innovative technique to sculpt an...
Gold Leaf
Hommage a?
By Oscar Edwards
Located in San Francisco, CA
This artwork titled "Hommage a ?" 1985 is a mixed media and collage on hardboard by noted Australian artist Oscar Edwards, 1905-1996. It is signed, titled and dated in the back (See ...
Mixed Media
BRLN 24
By Louis Cameron
Located in Saint Louis, MO
"Cameron’s “Collage Paintings,” 2021–22, which he has been assembling in parts ever since relocating to Berlin from the United States in 2015. The source materials are photographs that Cameron has been taking as he perambulates through the city, their compositional logic derived from African American quilting...
Canvas, Paper
Untitled (Collage, mixed media)
By Benjamin Spark
Located in Oostende, BE
Benjamin SPaRK is a Franco-Belgian artist born in 1969, who lives and works in Brussels. The painting was made as a gift for a friend, as it says on the back 'to my friend Alick'
Canvas
Share 01
Located in New York, NY
Acrylic and spray paint on stretched canvas, wood aluminum chassis. Featuring the word "SHARE" as the main subject of this painting, Denis Meyers uses of of his own favorite and impo...
Spray Paint, Acrylic, Permanent Marker, Canvas
Untitled
By Josh Smith
Located in London, GB
Josh Smith Untitled, 2007 Signed, numbered and dated 'JSC07474 Josh Smith 2007 Acrylic and Collage on Panel 122.0 x 91.2 cm Originally trained as a printmaker, Josh Smith has become...
Mixed Media, Panel
Timeless
By John Quigley
Located in New York, NY
Mixed Media on panel. Homage to the famed Channel. Fashion. Artist Statement: "I am a self-taught artist who utilizes an experimental approach. I let the experience of creating...
Mixed Media
Untitled
By Charlie Miesmer
Located in Fairfield, CT
Mixed media on panel
Mixed Media
BRLN 26
By Louis Cameron
Located in Saint Louis, MO
"Cameron’s “Collage Paintings,” 2021–22, which he has been assembling in parts ever since relocating to Berlin from the United States in 2015. The source materials are photographs that Cameron has been taking as he perambulates through the city, their compositional logic derived from African American quilting...
Canvas, Paper
I Wish I (Dom Perignon)
By Robert Mars
Located in Napa, CA
Robert Mars’ graphic compositions and rich colors provide an ideal medium in which to explore his fascination with the Golden Age of American popular culture and the icons of the 195...
Resin, Panel
Bollinger
By Robert Mars
Located in Napa, CA
Robert Mars’ graphic compositions and rich colors provide an ideal medium in which to explore his fascination with the Golden Age of American popular culture and the icons of the 195...
Resin, Paper
How Do U Want It (Chanel)
By Robert Mars
Located in Napa, CA
Robert Mars’ graphic compositions and rich colors provide an ideal medium in which to explore his fascination with the Golden Age of American popular culture and the icons of the 195...
Resin, Panel
From Americas Best Loved (Marilyn)
By Robert Mars
Located in Napa, CA
Robert Mars’ graphic compositions and rich colors provide an ideal medium in which to explore his fascination with the Golden Age of American popular culture and the icons of the 1950’s and 60’s. Drawing inspiration from the near-mythical fame that surrounded celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn before the instant and all-encompassing presence of the internet, Mars’ daring approach creates paintings with a nostalgic yet innovative vintage quality. Mars begins by defining borders and background planes of color with sheets of brown paper and then proceeds to layer paint and vintage paper ephemera. He selectively sands segments of the layers, allowing specific portions of the underpainting to shine through, creating the sensation that the viewer is getting glimpses through a window into the Golden Age of America. By incorporating actual pieces of print from the eras he so adores and sealing it all under shining, impenetrable resin, Mars’s artworks transform into physical remembrances of a period in America’s past so loved and idolized, yet will forever remain trapped in history. A graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York, his artwork was selected for the Absolut Vodka Blank campaign alongside Damien Hirst, and his largest sized piece to date was acquired by Philip Morris/Altria for their corporate headquarters in Virginia. In 2015 Mars was chosen for the cover of Neiman Marcus’ May Book, while CocaCola purchased several existing works and ordered commissions for a world tour celebrating the 100-year anniversary of their trademark bottle shape, in which his artwork was spotlighted. Mars is a featured artist for a custom high end wallpaper and tile series with Kari Whitman...
Resin, Panel
MS_04.2_24
By Robert Landry
Located in Napa, CA
Somewhere at the intersection of the uncertain and the inevitable, art happens. Robert R. Landry integrates traditional and digital tools at hand in an eclectic vocabulary of nonarbi...
Canvas, Paper, Acrylic
MS_01.2_24
By Robert Landry
Located in Napa, CA
Somewhere at the intersection of the uncertain and the inevitable, art happens. Robert R. Landry integrates traditional and digital tools at hand in an eclectic vocabulary of nonarbi...
Canvas, Paper, Acrylic
