Mel Ramos was an American artist best known for his provocative paintings and prints inspired by Pop Art and the Pin-up style. Ramos blended images of idealized naked women with popular objects such as Coca Cola bottles and movie posters. His style is inspired by the kind of sensuality typical of the Playboy magazine, and his images are grounded in surrealism and absurd connections between unrelated objects. Back then, he primarily created images of popular superheroes and gradually began to compose female nudes out of bizarre objects such as corn stalks, bananas, candy wrappers, martini glasses or famous brands of cigars and cigarettes, such as Havana.
Mel Ramos was born in Sacramento in 1935 to a Portuguese-Azorean immigrant family. He attended Sacramento Junior College and San Jose State College. One of his art teachers and mentors was the famous Wayne Thiebaud, whose work had a lasting influence on Mel Ramos.
Mel Ramos first became known in the early 1970s and has participated in about 120 collective exhibitions to date. Along with legendary Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Ramos was one of the first artistic personalities to use comic book imagery as a guide for their paintings. In addition, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Ramos jointly exhibited their works at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1963.
Mel Ramos died in October 2018 at the age of 83. According to his daughter and studio director Rochelle Leininger, the cause of death was heart failure.
