ROBERT MARS

Robert Mars uses art to express nostalgia for a time before he was born.

An artistic descendant of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, he explores the icons of American pop, from Marilyn Monroe to Coca-Cola, packaging celebrities opposite brands and advertising them as if they were luxury items.

To create his work, he uses Xerox transfer to layer images and text from his vast archive of old magazines - photocopying and blowing them up to accentuate imperfections - and adds brightly colored paint and minimalist patterns, then upends the image to further emphasize the sense of a fading era.

Robert Mars finishes the work with a coat of resin or by adding neon lights, giving these memorials a glossy sheen to be desired.