Chanel Bottle

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Robert Mars
Chanel Bottle
2016

About the Item

Through the application of a rich color palette and tongue-in-cheek attitude, Mars’ paintings evoke a vintage quality of design and look to the Golden Age of American icons in fashion, film and culture. He has always been fascinated with 1950’s and 60’s culture, and his early work reflects many of the architectural and mechanical icons from this era. More recently however, Mars’ artwork has shifted toward the culture of celebrity and he is amazingly attuned to the fact that these instantly recognizable and larger-than-life personalities and associated objects, such as this iconic Chanel bottle, continue to resonate with contemporary American culture. Use of vintage papers layered, sanded and coated in resin to evoke reflective glass, serves as a dramatic background to the universally recognizable perfume bottle drawn in deep purple neon light tubing. A graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York, Mars begins the creative process by preparing his surface with multiple layers of brown paper in order to define the edges and delineate the background planes of color. He then alternates layers of paint and vintage paper ephemera, sanding away portions of the layers as he works, revealing the desired portions of under painting with the overall intention to provide the viewer with a muted window into America’s past. Chronicling this fascination with 1950’s and 60’s iconography, Mars has produced a body of artwork from his studio in New York that celebrates the commonplace objects and icons of an America long past, in a thoroughly modern and exquisitely constructed manner. His eye for a distinct facet of American history is impeccable and his ability to manipulate the color and wordplay of vintage printed material has earned him reference with the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Diebenkorn among other masters from the School of Pop. Robert Mars’ artwork is exhibited worldwide including museum collections in Munich, Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, Paris, Aspen and Naples. His artwork was selected for the Absolut Vodka Blank campaign alongside DamienHirst, 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. 2016 will see Mars as a featured artist for a custom high end wallpaper and tile series with Kari Whitman Interiors. He will have a solo exhibition at the Evansville Museum of Art in Indiana, where he will also be an artist in residence and guest lecture

Creator:
Robert Mars (1969, American)
Creation Year:
2016
Dimensions:
Height: 46 in (116.84 cm)Width: 36 in (91.44 cm)Depth: 3 in (7.62 cm)
Medium:
Neon Light,Mixed Media
Movement & Style:
Pop Art
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Greenwich, CT
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU90113105091

Shop All Robert Mars

Robert Mars

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.