Mel Ramos

Mel Ramos, painter of nudes and one of the first Pop Art rebels, is viewed as one of the most significant representatives of the Californian version of this art. Like his colleagues in New York, his career began as a commercial artist. And like those New York artists, he was interested in the everyday myths of his time: comic-strip figures and the synthetic dreams of the advertising world. Since 1963 he has developed a penchant for popular erotic fantasies of women: from the cartoon superheroine to the dominatrix to the pin-up girl. He creates cyclical series based around the female nude: humorous, ironic portrayals of the love lives of antique gods or painterly paraphrases of the classical masterpieces of Ingres, Manet, Modigliani and de Kooning, examining his motif using subdued eroticism.