VIENNA.-Galerie Ernst Hilger presents Mel Ramos, on view through Februaru 16, 2008. Mel Ramos' provocative paintings and prints put him on the map as an important Pop artist. Over 30 years along with the heroes and heroines of popular comic series, nude, female bodies of male phantasies depicted with bold outline and bright colours dominate his artistic oeuvre. They are not beautiful by nature in the classical sense, they are more farcically and constructed in their stainlessness and glamour. He supports this staginess by pairing them with artefacts of American consumerism, which are courting with their own seductive idealization. These pin ups, whose type he took from calendar art, the girlie illustrations and the Playboy magazine, are recovered in a synthetic world, bedded on fruits, at posing with larger than life consumer goods, at the game with lifelike animals, viewed trough a keyhole and shown in the same attitude as the great nudes of the art history. (Catalogue is in preparation).

Biography: Mel Ramos was born in Sacramento, California, 1935. 1958 Master of Arts Degree from the California State University, Sacramento, 1967-1997 Teaching at the California State University, Hayward. He lives and works in Oakland, California and Horta de Sant Juan, Spain.