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.
