“I am for an art that attacks the eyes, I love sight thrills”, says Mel Ramos, one of the leading exponents of American Pop Art. Working with imagery garnered from popular culture and the mass media Ramos’ airbrushed works combine nude pin-up girls from American magazines and advertisements of branded products.

His first exhibition was Pop Goes the Easel, a group show at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston in 1963. A solo exhibition followed in 1964 at Bianchini Gallery in New York. Writer and critic Robert Rosenblum said at the time “I stumbled into the Bianchini Gallery one day and…

“I am for an art that attacks the eyes, I love sight thrills”, says Mel Ramos, one of the leading exponents of American Pop Art. Working with imagery garnered from popular culture and the mass media Ramos’ airbrushed works combine nude pin-up girls from American magazines and advertisements of branded products.

His first exhibition was Pop Goes the Easel, a group show at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston in 1963. A solo exhibition followed in 1964 at Bianchini Gallery in New York. Writer and critic Robert Rosenblum said at the time “I stumbled into the Bianchini Gallery one day and saw for the first time paintings by Mel Ramos. I was instantly delighted by this surge of what looked like yet another new kind of insolent vulgarity that might thoroughly dispose of the lofty moral pretensions and ivory-tower elitism of so much New York painting of the 50s… I couldn’t help feeling that Ramos’ paintings were from another planet”

His work is held in many public and private collections, including the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, New York.