The Art of Mel RamosThe Art of Mel Ramos
Mel Ramos (b. 1935) was an American figurative painter who is best known for his paintings of female nudes in the contexts of commercialism and sleek graphic design. Born in Sacramento, California, to a first-generation Portuguese-Azorean immigrant family, his work has become synonymous with iconic paintings of superheroes and voluptuous female nudes bursting through banana peels, stepping out of candy wrappers or lounging in martini glasses.
His first exhibition in 1957 featured his early work in figurative abstractions at the Crocker Art Museum in a group show titled Seven Painters Under Thirty. As one of the first artists to paint images from comic books, he exhibited at LACMA in 1963 with other emerging Pop artists of the time, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol – ranking him among the founders of “Pop Art” in America.
As artists of that time increasingly questioned the rise of consumer culture, they also incorporated the solid colors and graphic forms of commercial art into their approaches to painting.
Following the more abstract style of his mentor, Wayne Thiebaud, Ramos’s distinctive flair for reinventing the classic female nude as a form of beauty, play, and even irony became more closely associated with other California artists of his time, especially the “cool school” of the 1970s.
His most notable Pop Art invocations brought comic book superheroes into new contexts of power and play – combined with his signature nudes into a 2012 retrospective, returning to the site of his first exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum: Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Superheroes, Nudes and Other Pop Delights.
Over a sixty-year career, Mel Ramos exhibited in more than 120 group shows and solo exhibitions worldwide, represented by galleries in California, New York, Spain, Austria and Germany, marking him as a foremost international artist of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
1935 Born July 24 in Sacramento, California
1954-55 Sacramento Junior College
1955-56 San Jose State College
1957 Sacramento State College B.A. Degree
1958 Sacramento State College M.A. Degree
1958-1960 Elk Grove High School, Sacramento, CA
1960-1966 Mira Loma High School, Sacramento, CA
1965-1966 Sacramento State College, Sacramento, CA
1966 Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
1966-1997 California State University, Hayward ,CA (Professor Emeritus)
1970 Syracuse University, Syracuse ,NY
1973 University of Wisconsin, Madison, WS
1986 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grant
United States-France Exchange Fellowship Albertina, Vienna, Austria
Albright- Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, ARK
Art Bank, U.S. Department of State, Washington D.C.
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa
de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA
de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA
Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany Indianapolis Museum, Indianapolis, IN
Kunsthaus, Darmstadt, Germany
Lakeview Museum of Arts & Sciences, Peoria, IL
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Monterey Museum Museum of Art, Monterey, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, North Macedonia
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Neue Galerie Stadt Aachen, Aachen, Germany
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA
Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA
Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland
Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA
Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis , MO
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA
Sintra Museo de Arte Moderna, Sintra, Portugal
Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
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