Mel Ramos (*1935 in Sacramento, California), one of the most significant figures of Pop Art, borrows motifs from the mass media and commercial advertisements for his work, just as his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein did. To create his paintings, he combines a wide variety of consumer goods with immaculate, self-confident, and frequently naked women. Drawing upon the imagery in pinup magazines of the fifties and sixties and the lifestyle magazines of today, he portrays his female figures wrapped lasciviously around the products with which he pairs them. This publication offers a survey of Ramos's production over the last fifty years, ranging from the first self-portrait he executed in 1959 to his most recent three-dimensional works.
On the occasion of the artist's first large-scale museum retrospective in Europe as well as his seventy-fifth birthday, this volume presents several insightful essays and illustrations of around ninety works drawn from the various series Ramos has produced, including his earliest figurative paintings, his depictions of comic-book heroes and heroines, the Fashion and Animal Paintings, his famous pinup girls, his tributes to art history, his landscapes, and his sketches and recent sculptures.