Mel Ramos Catalogue Raisonné

At the beginning of the 1960s, Mel Ramos devoted himself to the central theme in his oeuvre, and developed the visual vocabulary that is so very characteristic for him: naked women adorning oversize advertising articles populate his colourful, two-dimensional oil paintings.Mel Ramos thus works with double entendre, since his works are formulations of an erotic fantasy that represents a fundamental pattern of marketing strategies in advertising. This publication records Mel Ramos's entire painterly oeuvre, from the first works in the 1950s until today, hence demonstrating his enduring position in Pop Art.In 1963 Mel Ramos, one of the first artists to embrace Pop Art, developed a preference for a tantalizing, seductive visual language. In typical Pop Art colours, beauty queens and nude Hollywood stars are combined with commodities to populate his paintings.In accordance with advertising aesthetics, he placed female bodies in erotic, occasionally vulgar poses on top of consumer goods, thus taking his theme from advertising's enduring slogan, 'sex sells'.