Mel Ramos

Mel Ramos was an American Pop artist known for his provocative injection of commercial imagery in the fine art arena. Ramos gained fame for his surreal juxtapositions of nude women and oversized consumer objects. His work sits alongside that of Pop art giants like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, though Ramos infused his own unique approach to figurative painting.

Born in 1935 in Sacramento, California, Ramos studied at Sacramento State College, earning both his BA and MA in art. Ramos’s excursion into the world of Pop had begun with his paintings — in incongruous oils inspired by his teacher and mentor Wayne Thiebaud — of superheroes pillaged from the pages of comic books.

Ramos focused on women as his subjects, often basing them on female celebrities of the day such as Marilyn Monroe and presenting them in a manner that was at once eroticised and also tied into the iconography of advertising. Ramos incorporated the mores of advertising into his work to smart satirical effect.

Rather than objectifying women, his paintings parody the sexualised desire for consumer goods that flooded the magazines and billboards of post-war America. Famous works like Chiquita Banana and Lola Cola— the latter an emblem of Pop art — feature pin-up models with recognisable product logos, critiquing the commodification of the female body. Ramos’s nudes are a provocative visualisation of the adage that ‘sex sells’, openly indulging in the carnal impulses that are inseparable from commerce’s language of longing, fantasy and gratification.

Mel Ramos died in 2018 aged 83. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and more.