Mel Ramos

At the beginning of the 1960s, Mel Ramos devoted himself to the central theme in his oeuvre, and developed the visual vocabulary that is so very characteristic for him: naked women adorning oversize advertising articles populate his colourful, two-dimensional oil paintings.Mel Ramos thus works with double entendre, since his works are formulations of an erotic fantasy that represents a fundamental pattern of marketing strategies in advertising. This publication records Mel Ramos's entire painterly oeuvre, from the first works in the 1950s until today, hence demonstrating his enduring position in Pop Art.In 1963 Mel Ramos, one of the first artists to embrace Pop Art, developed a preference for a tantalizing, seductive visual language. In typical Pop Art colours, beauty queens and nude Hollywood stars are combined with commodities to populate his paintings.In accordance with advertising aesthetics, he placed female bodies in erotic, occasionally vulgar poses on top of consumer goods, thus taking his theme from advertising's enduring slogan, 'sex sells'.

Catalogue Raisonné

A Twenty Year Survey, April 13-May 16, 1980

Otto Letze

Like his fellow Pop painters Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Mel Ramos (born 1935) derives the motifs for his work from mass media and advertising. In bold and immediately recognizable canvases, he unites consumer goods with idealized pin-up girls modeled after magazine images dating from the 1950s and 1960s. Ramos immortalizes these models' lascivious poses by entwining them with the featured products in what he calls "commercial pin-ups." This monograph illustrates and discusses many of these works, but also provides insight into the artist's multifaceted oeuvre by presenting more than 100 works, from his first portraits of people, comic heroes and heroines, and his prominent pin-up girls, to his latest works from the Galatea series. Celebrating the artist's 75th birthday, this catalogue accompanies a major European retrospective, the first to unite Ramos' drawings, paintings and sculptures.

50 Years of Pop Art

Belinda Grace Gardner

Artwork by Mel Ramos. Edited by Thomas Levy. Text by Belinda Grace Gardner.

Mel Ramos

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