Mel Ramos (b. 1935) was an American figurative painter who is best known for his paintings of female nudes in the contexts of commercialism and sleek graphic design. Born in Sacramento, California, to a first-generation Portuguese-Azorean immigrant family, his work has become synonymous with iconic paintings of superheroes and voluptuous female nudes bursting through banana peels, stepping out of candy wrappers or lounging in martini glasses. His first exhibition in 1957 featured his early work in figurative abstractions at the Crocker Art Museum in a group show titled Seven Painters Under Thirty. As one of the first artists to paint images from comic books, he exhibited at LACMA in 1963 with other emerging Pop artists of the time, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol – ranking him among the founders of “Pop Art” in America. As artists of that time increasingly questioned the rise of consumer culture, they also incorporated the solid colors and graphic forms of commercial art into their approaches to painting. Following the more abstract style of his mentor, Wayne Thiebaud, Ramos’s distinctive flair for reinventing the classic female nude as a form of beauty, play, and even irony became more closely associated with other California artists of his time, especially the “cool school” of the 1970s. His most notable Pop Art invocations brought comic book superheroes into new contexts of power and play – combined with his signature nudes into a 2012 retrospective, returning to the site of his first exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum: Mel Ramos: 50 Years of Superheroes, Nudes and Other Pop Delights. Over a sixty-year career, Mel Ramos exhibited in more than 120 group shows and solo exhibitions worldwide, represented by galleries in California, New York, Spain, Austria and Germany, marking him as a foremost international artist of the 20th and early 21st centuries. SELECT PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, ARKArt Bank, U.S. Department of State, Washington D.C.Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CADes Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowade Young Museum, San Francisco, CAde Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany Indianapolis Museum, Indianapolis, IN Kunsthaus, Darmstadt, GermanyLakeview Museum of Arts & Sciences, Peoria, ILLos Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CAMonterey Museum Museum of Art, Monterey, CAMuseum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CAMuseum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, North MacedoniaMuseum of Modern Art, New York, NY Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.Neue Galerie Stadt Aachen, Aachen, GermanyNorton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CAOakland Museum, Oakland, CAPalm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CAReykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, IcelandRose Art Museum, Waltham, MASaint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis , MOSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CAScottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UKSeattle Art Museum, Seattle, WASintra Museo de Arte Moderna, Sintra, PortugalSmithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY