American pop-art painter Mel Ramos was born in Sacramento in 1935, and began studying art there in 1953. Ramos received his first major recognition in the 1960s; since 1959, he has participated in over 120 group exhibitions. Along with Roy Lichtenstein and

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  Biography of Mel Ramos

  

  American pop-art painter Mel Ramos was born in Sacramento in 1935, and began studying art there in 1953. Ramos received his first major recognition in the 1960s; since 1959, he has participated in over 120 group exhibitions. Along with Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, he was one of the first artists to make paintings from comic strip images, and works by all three artists were exhibited together at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1963. Along with Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann and Wayne Thiebaud, Ramos produced artworks that celebrated aspects of popular culture and were represented in the mass media. He first exhibited at the David Stuart Gallery in 1965 and in Europe from 1971. The Oakland Museum in California devoted its first retrospective exhibition to him in 1977. Like Roy Lichtenstein, his early career was inspired by American comic-book imagery, with effigies of Batman and Flash Gordon. He later turned to the theme of the pin-up girl, whose figures stand out against backgrounds represented by brand logos. In the 1970s, he turned his attention to art-historical classics such as Edouard Manet 's “ Olympia ‘ and Jacques-Louis Davis's ’ Amour et Psyché ”. A retrospective of over 50 years of his work was held at the Crocker Art Museum in his native Sacramento in 2012. Mel Ramos died on October 14, 2018 in Oakland (California, USA); he was 83.

  
  

  

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