Mel Ramos (1935-2018) - Peek a Boo

Mel Ramos – Portfolio Vintage Peek-a-Boo
Mel Ramos was an American artist primarily known for his provocative paintings and prints inspired by pop art and pin-up styles. He combined images of idealized naked women with popular objects such as Coca-Cola bottles and film posters. His style is rooted in the sensuality typical of Playboy. Ramos’s paintings are influenced by surrealism and feature absurd connections between independent objects.

Early career
Mel Ramos was born in 1935 in Sacramento to a Portuguese-Azorean immigrant family. He was a figurative painter specializing in the production of female nudes. Although his work is clearly figurative, it also includes various elements of abstract art. Mel Ramos began to gain popularity during the expansion of the Pop Art movement in the 1960s. At that time, he mainly created images of popular superheroes and gradually began to incorporate female nudes from bizarre objects such as corn stems, bananas, candy wrappers, martini glasses, or famous cigar and cigarette brands like Havana. In pieces such as Butterfinger from 1995 and Miss Lucky Lulu from 1965, Ramos combined youthful, ironically perfect female bodies with American chocolate bars, cigarettes, and other branded items.

When it came to his education and academic career, Ramos attended Sacramento Junior College and San Jose State College. One of his art teachers and mentors was the famous Wayne Thiebaud. His work had a strong influence on Mel Ramos. The artist graduated in 1958 and earned his B.A. and M.A. from Sacramento State College. From 1958 to 1966, he was a teacher himself, teaching art courses at Elk Grove High School. Ramos began a career at California State University that greatly enhanced his biography.

Exhibitions:
Mel Ramos began to gain recognition in the early 1970s and has participated in around 120 group exhibitions to date. Along with legendary pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Ramos was one of the first artist personalities to base his painting on images from comics. Moreover, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Ramos exhibited their works together at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1963. Mel Ramos’s works have been shown in many major pop art exhibitions in the United States and Europe. In the 1960s, he started to use pin-up girl motifs much more frequently, contributing to his fame and popularity. In short, Mel Ramos’s art is an ironic response to the clichés we often see in advertising and the mass media.

Mel Ramos died in October 2018 at the age of 83. According to his daughter and studio manager Rochelle Leininger, the cause of death was heart failure.

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