Robert Mars
Break My Heart Sweetly

Name: Break My Heart Sweetly
Brand: Robert Mars
Price: 5000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

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. Beginning by defining borders and background planes of color with sheets of brown paper, Mars then proceeds to layer paint and vintage paper ephemera. Mars selectively sands segments of the layers, allowing specific portions of the underpainting, 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.

Creator:

Robert Mars (1969, American)

Dimensions:

Height: 24 in (60.96 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)

Medium:

Resin,Mixed Media,Panel

Movement & Style:

Pop Art

Period:

2010-

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Napa, CA

Reference Number:

Seller: ROMX-40011stDibs: LU14426308592

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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.

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