Opening May 3, 2026 and running through November 2026 at Palazzo Bragadin Carabba, Mel Ramos: An Iconography of American Beauty examines how Mel Ramos (1935-2018) helped define a new visual mythology of femininity in postwar America. 

Emerging in the 1960s alongside artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Ramos embraced Pop Art’s strategies of appropriation and mass-media imagery while developing a distinct painterly approach. Drawing on pin-up imagery, advertising and popular entertainment, his work reflects the emergence of a new iconography of American beauty: the modern woman whose sexual freedom and visibility became central to the visual culture of the era, just as they were consciously performing it. 

Through painting, Ramos transformed the contemporary pin-up into a modern Venus—playful yet monumental, suspended between spectacle and agency and elevated into a timeless goddess through the language of painting.