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Ramos was born in 1935 at Sacramento, California. Between 1954 and 1958 he studied at the Sacramento City College, the San José State College and the Sacramento State College, finishing with an M.A. From 1958 he taught at various institutions including Elk Grove High School, Mira Lama High School and California State College. In 1962-63 he began a series of garishly colored super-heroes taken from comic strips using a thick oleaginous pigment. In 1963 he was first included in a collective exhibition in Pop Goes the East at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. In 1964 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery, New York. In 1965 he developed a specific kind of Pop Art iconography by combining nude pin-up girls from American magazines and advertisements with branded products. In 1966 he exhibited at the Galerie Ricke, Kassel. In 1967 he had a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art; In 1969 he was represented in the exhibition Human Concerns at the Whitney Museum, New York, and had a one-man exhibition at the Gegenverkehr, Aachen. He exhibited at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, in 1972, and was represented at the Pop Art exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York, in 1974. In 1975 he had a retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, and in 1977 at the Oakland Museum, California. In 1978 he was included in the exhibition Art About Art, Whitney Museum, New York and at the Church Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, and the Galeria Plura, Milan, Italy. In 1980 The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University presented Mel Ramos: A Twenty Year Survey. 1981 saw a solo show at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York City; in 1985 the Meisel Gallery mounted another, The Four Seasons, and he has been showing regularly with them since then: Beauty And The Beast in 1989, The Artist's Studio in 1991, Mel Ramos - The Heroines of 1962-64, and in 1993 Mel Ramos: The Unfinished Painting Series. Ramos has also been featured at the Hokin/Kaufman Gallery, Chicago (1986); Mel Ramos - Early Paintings was presented by Galerie Tanja Grunert, Cologne, West Germany in 1986, and Studio Trisorio, Naples, Italy featured his works in 1987. In 1994-95 Mel Ramos - Retrospective, a traveling exhibition in Germany and Austria, was shown at the Kunstverein Lingen, Lingen; the Mannheimer Kunstverein, Mannheim; the Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel; and then went to Vienna under title Mel Ramos: Pop Art Images," showing at the Hochscule fur Angewandte Kunst.
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Ramos' works are in the permanent collections of the The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; ; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Kunsthaus Darmstadt, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the Neue Galerie Stadt Aachen, Germany; The Oakland Museum, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Franklin House Collection in San Francisco, and the Seattle Art Museum, WA.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1964+65 Bianchini Gallery, New York, NY; 1965 David Stuart Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; 1967 San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; 1971 Galerie Richard Fonchke, Ghent, Belgium; 1971 French & Company, New York, NY; 1971 Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland; , UT; 1973 Madison Art Center, WI; 1973 Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA; 1974 Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York, NY; 1976 Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York, NY; 1977 The Oakland Museum, CA;
Selected Bibliography: Carl Belz, Mel Ramos: A Twenty-Year Survey (Waltham MA: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1980); Elizabeth Claridge, Mel Ramos (London: Mathews Miller Dunbar Ltd., 1975); Elizabeth Claridge, The Girls of Mel Ramos (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1975); Walter Guadagnini, Mel Ramos (Milan: Electa/Gingko, 1999); Harvey L. Jones, Mel Ramos: Paintings 1959-1977 (Oakland: The Oakland Museum, 1977); Mel Ramos, Mel Ramos: Watercolors (Berkeley: Lancaster Miller Publishers, 1979); Robert Rosenblum, Mel Ramos: Pop Art Images (Koln: Taschen, 1997).
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