Peter Mars

Peter Mars (born 1959, Portland, Oregon) is an American artist with ties to both the Pop Art and Outsider Art movements. He attended Reed College, a small private college in Portland, from 1977 to 1982, earning a degree in chemistry, and in 1982 moved to New Orleans, where he lived and worked in the French Quarter through the mid-1980s and learned printmaking in the silkscreen studio of the Contemporary Arts Center.

Mars' paintings use silkscreen, or serigraphy (from the French words for silk writing), on wood, canvas and paper. In the tradition of Pop Art, mechanical repetition plays an important part in the work: he completes his paintings in series, where the same image appears each time within a slightly different context. His imagery comes from popular culture and everyday objects such as old signs, billboards, match packs, television shows, candy wrappers and wallpaper, and much of it reflects the American pop culture of his childhood in the 1960s and 70s, notably the idealized American family, comic-book figures, television and space-age inventions.

A lifelong collector of matchbooks, comic books, baseball cards, arrowheads, coins and old porcelain signs, Mars finds in each of these items a beauty and a small treasure that tells the story of American life. His collection now forms a library of images and colors, many drawn from vintage advertising, and pop bottles, vintage toys and old catalogues fill the shelves of his studio and home. Working with silkscreen as his medium of choice, he lets images speak their own language: placed in juxtaposition they agree or disagree, emphasize or interrupt, as if in animated conversation, and the result is a textured, wry commentary on popular culture, the passage of time and the icons each period adopts as its own.

Mars has been painting for more than 35 years. He was named an official artist of Elvis Presley Enterprises in 2008, and in 2011 his exhibition ELVIS ran at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. His work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Field Museum, the Kennedy Center and galleries across the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and is commonly included in exhibitions alongside Keith Haring, Banksy, Andy Warhol, Shepard Fairey and Jean-Michel Basquiat.