Mel Ramos (American, born 1935)
Born in Sacramento, California in 1935, Ramos has achieved much success and is one of the leading exponents of American Pop Art. His works are adventurous with a sense of humor, while revealing great technical skill and creative innovation. Along with fellow artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist, Ramos created art which exploited and celebrated aspects of popular culture as represented in mass media. Working with imagery garnered from popular culture and the mass media Ramos’ works combine nude pin-up girls from American magazines and advertisements of branded products. The result is his highly sexualized, polished and glossy images of women who are unidentifiable models as if reproduced directly off the pages of a fashion magazine.
Following Ramos’s solo exhibition in 1964 at Bianchini Gallery in New York, writer and art critic Robert Rosenblum remarked, “I stumbled into the Bianchini Gallery one day and saw for the first time paintings by Mel Ramos. I was instantly delighted by this surge of what looked like yet another new kind of insolent vulgarity that might thoroughly dispose of the lofty moral pretensions and ivory-tower elitism of so much New York painting of the 50s… I couldn’t help feeling that Ramos’ paintings were from another planet”.
Information courtesy of Sotheby’s May, 2008.