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As our stock levels are low on this sought after item, please contact the gallery direct on 0161 304 7333, or click enquire. |
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Peter Mars has been the leader of Chicago’s Pop Movement for the past 20 years. Combining avant-garde innovation with a deep Pop Art sensibility, Mars fuses and confuses the traditional dis tinctions between high culture and low art. The artist’s sensibilities fall somewhere between Dada and Pop, “In that area where nonsense and popular culture so frequently meet.”
Using the joy and nostalgia that can be found in everyday objects, Mars explores American pop culture, the passage of time, and the icons that each period adopts as its own. Billboard advertisements with years of old ads peeling through, outmoded wall-paper designs overprinted with modern icons, recognizable typography overlaps young female faces, antique Coca-Cola logos combined with a fresh-faced Elvis-each elicits a multiplicity of American eras and cultural identities. Much of Mars’ work reflects the pop culture of his childhood in the 1960s and 70s, notably the idealized American family, comic book figures, television and space age inventions.
In magazine advertising, product design, and television programming Mars finds a fertile language with which to work. To say that Mars appropriates these images, however, does not capture the rich exchange of ideas that takes place on canvas. These are dialogues, every bit as much collaborations as the work Mars created with notable Outsider artists Howard Finster, R.A. Miller and Wesley Willis and later with Graffiti artists RISK, Trixter and Slang and presently with contemporary Pop artists, Burton Morris, Jeff Schaller and Tom Judd.
Born in Portland, Oregon in 1959, Peter Mars began collec ting at an early age: matchbooks, comic books, baseball cards, arrowheads, coins and later, old gas station signs. Rather than striving to compile exhaustive collections, Mars sought separate images of beauty, small treasures that tell the story of American popular culture.
“While living in New Orleans, I saw a print by Alexander Calder that totally changed the direction of my art. I was drawn in by its big broad flat sweeping strokes of color. When I learned that it was a serigraph, I said to myself, I have to learn how to do that, whatever it is.
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