“ I got interested using the brand names ... The object also has to be an icon, something you don’t even think about. When you see a Coca-Cola sign you don’t even read it anymore, you just know what it says in your mind.”- Mel Ramos
Integral to Pop Art of the 1960s, Mel Ramos’ work epitomizes the lavish abundance of California in his series of female pop pin-ups staged together with consumer products. In repurposing visuals from mass media he has made the separation between fine art and ordinary culture ambiguous, developing a unique blend of artificiality and superreal precision, natural and synthetic colouring, depth and fatness. The Pause that Refreshes, executed in 2007, features a provocative female figure against a Coca-Cola sign backdrop. The figure, like a hybrid creature, osculates between a movie star and the girl next door, thus embodying the common theme of popular projections. Much like Andy Warhol, Ramos’ heroines become icons in the practical world, perceived through the power of media.
Mel Ramos is an American Pop artist best known for his paintings of female nudes alongside brand logos. His depictions of women with everyday products celebrate aspects of popular culture represented in mass media and advertising. Like his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Ramos was inspired by comic books and grew up drawing cartoons and characters from their pages. The artist's works, including paintings, prints and works on paper, feature in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.
2007 polychrome resin 74.7 x 75 x 20.5 cm. (29 3/8 x 29 1/2 x 8 1/8 in.) Signed and numbered 'Mel Ramos 4/8' right of figure. This work is number 4 from an edition of 8.
Estimate £70,000 - 110,000
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