MARILYN MINTER

Marilyn Minter juxtaposes photorealistic paintings with painterly photographs, honing in on the moment where clarity becomes abstraction and beauty meets the grotesque. Through painting, photography, and video, she has created a vast body of work which focuses on the female body and its portrayal in art history and popular media. Born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and based in New York, Minter received a BFA from University of Florida (1970) and an MFA from Syracuse University (1972). Her early work—intimate, raw portraits of her mother (Coral Ridge Towers, 1969); Benday-dot paintings which pair blood-red fingernails and banal food items (Food Porn, 1990) and her mid-1990s work featuring phallic lipsticks and eroticised body parts—traces the rift between idealised images of femininity and lived experience. In 1995, she began painting from her own manipulated photographs rather than appropriated images. In glossy enamel on metal, these images of women’s bodies comingle glitter and crystals with sweat, spit, and grime, embracing the body’s mess (Dirty Heel, 2008). In recent years, the artist has turned her attention to the bather as subject. Once the domain of a male-dominated Western art historical canon, Minter’s bathers express their own agency, oftentimes pictured behind frosty or steamed panes of glass, and are atypically discriminating in how they allow the viewer to consume their image.