Biography

The California-born artist Melvin John Ramos, better known as Mel Ramos, is today one of the most important representatives of Pop Art. The son of Portuguese immigrants studied art and art history in Sacramento, also in the class of Wayne Thiebaud, who influenced him sufficiently in the style he has pursued ever since. Especially through his superheroes borrowed from the comic world, such as Superman, Wonder Woman or Captain Midnight, he was able to win over the art-loving public of the early 1960s. From 1963 Ramos turned to his 'Commercial Pin-up Girls'. For this, he combined mostly nude or at least lightly clad women with a wide variety of painted advertising products from the American market. Seductively and provocatively, he placed the female bodies on or next to the life-size goods, true to the motto 'sex sells', which he wanted to parody. In the same year, the artist also had his first museum exhibitions in Oakland and Houston, followed a year later by his first solo show at the Bianchini Gallery in New York City. The so-called 'Animal Paintings', created between 1964 and 1971, further increased the provocative character of his art by depicting naked beauties together with animals. As his art career progressed, Ramos began to respond to the art of the old masters in the 1970s. He focused primarily on nudes from the 18th and 19th centuries and charged them with artistic elements of pop culture. Already in the 60s Ramos became a professor of painting at California State University in Hayward. Since 1992 he has lived in Spain as well as in California and has been presented at numerous international exhibitions. The largest retrospective to date took place in 2010 at the Villa Stuck in Munich.

Objects by Mel Ramos