Mel Ramos (1935-2018) Lot n° 146

Peek-a-boo-Pammie,2008 Oil on canvas 100 x 73 cm 39 3/8 x 28 47/64 in Mel Ramos Peek-a-boo-Pammie, 2008 Born in 1935 in Sacramento, Melvin John Ramos, known as Mal Ramos, is a major painter of the Pop Art movement. His work often finds its source in the female body, whose nudes are inspired by the imagery of American comics. Advertising brands, superheroes or Pin-Up, a whole Pop-Art vocabulary that is articulated under the expressive brush of Mel Ramos. In the 1970s, he played the game of detour by giving his version of some of the most important works of art, such as Edouard Manet's Olympia or Jacques-Louis David's Love and Psyche. But it is women who establish themselves in the work of the artist as the main sources of inspiration. Mel Ramos' work is presented in some thirty public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. After the Pin-up, the Peek-a-boo series became his signature. A real distinctive cycle in his work, several celebrities, naked, lend themselves to the game of observation through a keyhole. Refusing reproductive allegory and provocation, Mel Ramos multiplies the figurations of naked bodies, without reaching the limits of the sexual connotations that could result from it. Like advertising posters, his detour force derision through symbols. His naked women become the icons of the "consumerist religion". He questions by this process, the values inculcated by the Hollywood advertisers and questions the means of emancipation of the women. Here, it is the iconic and sultry Pamela Anderson, idyllic symbol of the female body of the 1990s, who lends her body to the contemporary evolution of Mel Ramos' nude, behind the lock that reveals her.