Sensual, intriguing and definitely empowering, Marilyn Minter's works have captivated a bold audience. Featured internationally, Minter's painting and photography explore cravings and sexuality. Her imagery is distinct and permeates culture (Marilyn Minter featured Lady Gaga in New York Times Magazine, October 3, 2018).
Born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, Marilyn Minter lives and works in New York City. Minter has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries internationally. These include the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; The 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY. Pretty/Dirty, a retrospective of Minter’s work opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2014 before touring to the MCA Denver, the Orange County Museum of Art, CA, and it closed at its final venue, the Brooklyn Museum, New York in 2017.
For over three decades Marilyn Minter has explored the “pathology of glamour” and advocated for women’s sexual agency. Closely cropping her subjects—lipstick lips giving a blow job, or an eye dripping with makeup—she subverts notions of desire, and exposes women’s daily undoing and redoing of physical appearance, the strive for perfection.
The images Minter generates always stand on the border of photorealism and abstraction. Closing in tight on stiletto clad feet, mouths full of gems, and made up eyes, she subverts fashion photography and tackles the trappings of gender, its rites and representation. In focusing on details she continually shoots her photographs at the moment before the image breaks out of focus.
She has recently been using a steamy pane of glass as a veil that mediates between the model and the camera, a technique that heightens the “illumination” that radiates from her photographs: the flushed color palettes and dewy skin shimmer and glow.
In 2023, Minter released her latest body of works. Focused on her recognizable style, the exhibition includes paintings of pop culture icons meaningful to her and her video work.
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