Mel RAMOS

(born, 1935 Sacramento, California)

Even during high school years at Junior College and the State College in Sacramento, California, Ramos was familiar with the Bay Area Figurative School or Art. He began to paint in a Pop Art style in the 1950’s. In what would be his artistic breakthrough, in 1963, together with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, he showed works in the famous "Pop! Goes the Easel " exhibition. His paintings, prints and sculptures all satirize the light-weight trite images of advertising in that they show eroticized images of Pin-Up girls lasciviously cuddling up to one commercial product of another. The human body has been transmuted into an advertising prop in a context in which the line between what is body, and what is product, has been blurred.

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Mel RAMOS
Chiquita banana 2007
© Mel Ramos / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017, Image Courtesy of Galerie Ernst Hilger and Institute for Cultural Exchange Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna