2012
Mel Ramos
29/10/2012 - 15/01/2013Lunedì / Sabato 10-13
15-19
Represented Artists: MEL RAMOS
Galleria Tega has the pleasure to present Mel Ramos’s exhibition , October 29 th - January 15 th 2012, Via Senato 20 in Milan.
An exhibition of selected sculptures by Mel Ramos (born in 1935 in Sacramento, California), one of the most important masters of American pop-art. Like the other protagonists of this artistic movement exploded in the United States in the Sixties, his attention is focused on that consumerism celebrated by a striking advertising campaigns. Unlike serial and sometimes coldly surgical simplicity of Andy Warhol or of a comic strip, or also instead of a distilled representation by Roy Lichtenstein, Ramos turned his attention to the combination of pin-up nudity and the product to advertise. All through a warm painting, solar and sensual evidently favored by the climate of his origin, so different from the rhythmic and sometimes obsessive behavior typical rule of the inhabitants of a metropolis like New York. And probably this detachment allows one hand to argue that hedonistic pleasure that leaked from his works and after to enable the resulting particularly effective weapon of irony. In fact, his provocative protagonists promote the object by superimposing their bodies to the product to advertise: they become themselves an attractive object of visual consumption and activate winking least complicity with the viewer captured by such seductive beauty. These bodies, played on many levels, also acquire a vocation which enhances the three-dimensional shapes. Therefore their translation painted sculptures became cloaked in a subsequent step inevitability. The current exhibition is aimed precisely at the creative landing of Ramos, thus, is to emphasize another of his complaints, the kitsch, addressed to certain objects of propaganda, which he takes into consideration, the balanced harmony typical of the great artist. In this circumstance, "Chiquita Banana", where from the exotic fruit erupts vertically the smooth bust of a girl, to '"Hav-a-Havana-2", where the model lies on a cigar of large size, in "Barbiburgher" which proposes a miss sitting comfortably on a sandwich stuffed in the unusual role of a soft pillow, a masterpiece like "The Pause That Refreshes" characterized by a sinuous "b side" overflowing with a label of Coca Cola.
Available a catalog edited by Luciano Caprile
An exhibition of selected sculptures by Mel Ramos (born in 1935 in Sacramento, California), one of the most important masters of American pop-art. Like the other protagonists of this artistic movement exploded in the United States in the Sixties, his attention is focused on that consumerism celebrated by a striking advertising campaigns. Unlike serial and sometimes coldly surgical simplicity of Andy Warhol or of a comic strip, or also instead of a distilled representation by Roy Lichtenstein, Ramos turned his attention to the combination of pin-up nudity and the product to advertise. All through a warm painting, solar and sensual evidently favored by the climate of his origin, so different from the rhythmic and sometimes obsessive behavior typical rule of the inhabitants of a metropolis like New York. And probably this detachment allows one hand to argue that hedonistic pleasure that leaked from his works and after to enable the resulting particularly effective weapon of irony. In fact, his provocative protagonists promote the object by superimposing their bodies to the product to advertise: they become themselves an attractive object of visual consumption and activate winking least complicity with the viewer captured by such seductive beauty. These bodies, played on many levels, also acquire a vocation which enhances the three-dimensional shapes. Therefore their translation painted sculptures became cloaked in a subsequent step inevitability. The current exhibition is aimed precisely at the creative landing of Ramos, thus, is to emphasize another of his complaints, the kitsch, addressed to certain objects of propaganda, which he takes into consideration, the balanced harmony typical of the great artist. In this circumstance, "Chiquita Banana", where from the exotic fruit erupts vertically the smooth bust of a girl, to '"Hav-a-Havana-2", where the model lies on a cigar of large size, in "Barbiburgher" which proposes a miss sitting comfortably on a sandwich stuffed in the unusual role of a soft pillow, a masterpiece like "The Pause That Refreshes" characterized by a sinuous "b side" overflowing with a label of Coca Cola.
Available a catalog edited by Luciano Caprile