Mouth #15

Description

Tom Wesselmann appropriated imagery from pop culture, incorporating magazine photos and newspaper ads into his frank depictions of American domestic interiors populated by female nudes. Later, focusing on individual body parts such as feet, mouths, and breasts, Wesselmann began to imagine them as disembodied, often on a monumental scale. In his Mouth series, he depicts a single female mouth on a canvas shaped to the contours of the lips. Like Warhol’s use of Marilyn Monroe’s lips, Wesselmann’s Mouth paintings investigate how sex is used to sell celebrity. Mouth #15 is a three-quarter-length view of a black-and-white laughing mouth that is at once seductive, remote, and ominous.