The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce Pop Perspectives: Ramos, Rosenquist, Ruscha, an exhibition to be held in Reading, Vermont from 10 May – 30 November 2025, which brings together the paintings of three seminal figures in American Pop Art: Mel Ramos, James Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha. Born within a few years of each other and all first championed by the legendary dealer Leo Castelli, these artists developed distinct yet intersecting approaches to the visual language of postwar consumer culture.

In an era defined by the rapid expansion and availability of popular imagery in advertising, films, comic books and everyday consumer products, Ramos, Rosenquist, and Ruscha each forged unique artistic identities while simultaneously celebrating and critiquing their shared cultural landscape. Their paintings engage with the glossy seductions of commercial culture, yet each artist twists the language of Pop in his own way—Ramos with his playful yet provocative figures intertwined with consumer goods, Rosenquist with his cinematic, fragmented, and surreal compositions drawn from advertising, politics, and consumer culture, and Ruscha with his minimal and poetic text-based works that reflect the landscape, architecture and culture of the American West. This exhibition isn’t just about three artists who happened to emerge in the same moment—it’s about how their work reflects, critiques, and ultimately reshapes the iconography of 20th-century America. Through their paintings, we see the evolution of Pop Art beyond the factory-like seriality of Any Warhol or the process-focused renderings of Roy Lichtenstein. Instead, these artists offer a more nuanced, often ironic, engagement with the visual overload of their time.

Since the 1960s, Mel Ramos (1935-2018) has made playful and ironic paintings of female nudes that appropriate the visual language of advertising and popular culture. Inspired by sources as varied as comic books, pin-up magazines, classic Hollywood cinema and iconic paintings of female nudes in the cannon of art history, his provocative and humorous works explore and satirize the idealization of the female form in art, fashion and advertising. Camilla - Queen of the Jungle Empire (1963) presents a voluptuous and self-assured Marilyn Monroe like female as a 1940s comic book heroine. Then, in works like Ketsup Kween (Catsup Queen) (1965), Ramos juxtaposes fully nude female figures with images of consumer products. Influenced by his teacher and friend, Wayne Thiebaud, Ramos’ scantily clad and powerful women are painted in thick, vivid colors within sharp multi-hued contour lines and presented against neutral color fields.

When he first arrived in New York City in 1955, James Rosenquist (1933-2017) supported himself by painting commercial billboards, often in the Times Square area. During this time, he became exceedingly skilled with the techniques of enlarging photographs in paint to the scale of billboards. Realizing he could apply the same techniques to his own artworks, Rosenquist began making often monumental paintings that fragmented, juxtaposed, layered and interwove imagery from popular culture, politics and advertising. Loaded with references and contemporary symbols, Rosenquist’s paintings reflect contemporary life in America while exploring the role of advertising and consumer culture in art. In The Monsoon Begins (1984), Rosenquist uses a crosshatch technique to intersect imagery of vibrant tropical flowers with fragments of women’s faces taken from magazines clippings. Interweaving a commercialized and idealized representation of beauty, Rosenquist showcases the inherent beauty of nature and highlights the paradox of two worlds that inform our visual vocabulary and experience of the world today.

Since the 1960s, Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) has explored the role of language in painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, and bookmaking by using the meaning and formal qualities of words as his principle subject matter. The words and phrases that Ruscha uses as his subjects are derived from American vernacular, advertising, and popular culture. Decontextualized from time and place, letters, words, and phrases take on a symbolic quality as Ruscha explores their formal qualities. Ruscha’s monumental painting, Pretty Girl vs. Evil and Trouble (1979) depicts an exaggerated horizontal sunset devoid of any features or landmarks except for two subtle lines with arrows along the bottom left and right sides. One points left to “PRETTY GIRL MOVING THIS WAY", while "EVIL AND TROUBLE GOING THIS WAY" points to the right. For Ruscha, sunsets represent transformation and the ephemeral nature of an ever-changing landscape. The expansive format of the painting recalls the landscape of the American West and suggests the passage of time as the muted colors and shifting tones stretch across the canvas like one's experience gazing out the window of a moving car.

Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States
 

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.