Mel Ramos

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Mel Ramos, 2007

Mel Ramos (born July 24, 1935 in Sacramento , California as Melvin John Ramos , † October 14, 2018 in Oakland , California) was an American artist and is considered an important representative of Pop Art .

Life

Mel Ramos was born the son of Portuguese immigrants and studied arts at Sacramento Junior College and Sacramento State College . He lived in Oakland and in Horta de San Juan ( Spain ).

plant

As a student of Wayne Thiebaud , Mel Ramos was close to the so-called Bay Area Figurative School , which from the 1950s onwards separated from the Abstract Expressionism that was predominant in the USA at the time . In 1961, Mel Ramos began to paint comic book characters such as Batman , Superman and The Specter .

From 1963 he turned to the central theme of his work. Via female superheroes like Wonder Woman , he came up with the portrayal of pin-up girls and typical arrangements from advertising , which is supposed to sell the products by depicting provocative female sexuality. In the process he created pictures in which he “draped women in a vulgar, vital pose on painted goods and thus parodied the trivial glamor gestures of an advertising gimmick that fueled the desire to buy with sexual stimuli.” These “commercial pin-ups” were to be Mel's trademark for decades Ramos stay. He received criticism for his explicit portrayals of women in the 1960s from the conservative and later also from the feminist side. His first solo exhibition took place in 1966 in the Ricke Gallery in Kassel . In a solo exhibition in 1967, Ramos pictures were imposed by the Cologne police: The exhibition had shown works from his Animal Paintings series, which combined women in unambiguous poses with animals such as seals, kangaroos and hippos.

From 1972 Ramos satirized the nudes of classical masters such as Ingres , Modigliani and Manet in his “Unfinished Paintings” , replacing their subtle eroticism with the more direct sex appeal of pin-ups. Ramos used other quotes from art history in his series “I still get a thrill when I see Bill” and “The Transfiguration of Galatea”, in which he used the works of Willem de Kooning and ancient sculptures as subjects.

From 1966 to 1997 Ramos taught as a professor of painting at California State University in Hayward.

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1963: Participation in Pop Art exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of California and the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston
  • 1964: Solo exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in New York
  • 1965: Participation in the group exhibition Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, etc. in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
  • 1966: Participation in the traveling exhibition 11 Pop Artists through the USA
  • 1967: Solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art
  • 1969: First solo exhibition in Germany in oncoming traffic, Center for Contemporary Art, in Aachen
  • 1972: Solo exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
  • 1974: Participation in a Pop Art exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York
  • 1975: Solo exhibition in the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld
  • 1977: First retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California
  • 1991: Participation in the major international traveling exhibition "Pop Art" (Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
  • 1999: Participation in the group exhibition "Pop Impressions" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • 2007: Participation in the exhibition Pop Art Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery in London and in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart
  • 2010: Mel Ramos. 50 years of Pop Art , Kunsthalle Tübingen , (first European retrospective of the artist)
  • 2011: Mel Ramos , Villa Stuck, Munich
  • 2011: Mel Ramos. Girls, Candies & Comics , Albertina, Vienna
  • 2012: Mel Ramos retrospective , Albertina Vienna
  • 2015: Mel Ramos. My Age of Pop . Ludwig Museum Koblenz

supporting documents

  1. a b Keyword Mel Ramos. In: Herbert Read (Hrsg.): DuMont's artist dictionary: From antiquity to the present. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1997; P. 531. ISBN 3-7701-4015-X .
  2. ^ Ludwig Museum Koblenz

literature

  • Otto Letzke (Ed.): Mel Ramos. 50 years of pop art. Exhibition catalog as part of the exhibition of the same name in the Kunsthalle Tübingen from January 23 to April 25, 2010, Hatje Canz Verlag, Ostfildern 2010; ISBN 978-3-7757-2530-9 .
  • Elisabeth Claridge (texts): Mel Ramos. Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1975.

Web links