Since the mid-1960s, Mel Ramos has dedicated himself to the depiction of the female nude, which he captures on his canvases in an ideal-typical manner and in luminous colours - a subject that is as old as art itself. In doing so, he draws on the popular photographic aesthetic of pin-up magazines as well as on famous models from the iconic canon of images in art history. With his consistently figurative painting, he transfers the age-old subject of the female nude into a contemporary form that always includes the phenomenon of mass media and modern consumer culture. Distancing himself from the ubiquitous Abstract Expressionism, Ramos turned to figurative painting based on comic book motifs in the early 1960s, which initially linked him to the Pop artists of the East Coast. But unlike Lichtenstein and Warhol, Ramos never left the path of painting, as did his teacher Wayne Thibaud, who had also become one of the protagonists of West Coast Pop Art with his still lifes of American food.
