Marilyn Minter Biography

Despite the stylistic changes in a career that now spans more than four decades, Minter's perennial subject matter has been the complex networks of relationships that exist between women’s lives and the world that surrounds them. From frankly disturbing photographs of her drug-addled mother that she took when she was still a student, through her series of infamous paintings based on hard-core pornography, through her Plush photographs that glamorised pubic hair, to her most recent large-scale high-keyed paintings of women licking steamy glass, Minter has never shied away from the paradoxical nature of sexuality. 

Throughout her career Minter's work has been given further substance by its engagement with private and public politics. This has been reflected in her recurrent efforts to present her work in more easily accessible situations than galleries or museums. In 1990, she produced a television ad that ran on late night network television for her exhibition 100 Food Porn which took place at the Simon Watson Gallery (1 November – 1 December), in 2006 she worked with Creative Time to present her paintings on enormous billboards, and she worked with Miley Cyrus and Marc Jacobs to produce a t-shirt to support Planned Parenthood, the 100-year-old nonprofit organisation that is the largest single provider of reproductive health services, including abortion, in the United States.

Minter’s career retrospective Marilyn Minter: Pretty/ Dirty (which had previously been seen at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (18 April – 2 August, 2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (18 September, 2015 – 31 January, 2016), and the Orange County Museum of Art (2 April - 10 July, 2016)) opened to public at the Brooklyn Museum on 4 November 2016.

Robert Ayers | Ocula | 2017