Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty

Minter’s art skews glamour with consumerist critique

Marilyn Minter is famed for her glossy, hyper-realistic paintings, photographs and video works―seductive images that borrow the language of fashion and advertising photography, exploring the boundaries of desire, sensuality and body anxiety in the age of consumption. Close-up imagery of mouths, feet, splashes and puddles, rendered in high-gloss enamel on sheets of metal, subversively questions the pathology of glamour. Produced in conjunction with the first major museum retrospective on her work, Pretty/Dirty examines every period of the artist's 40-year career, from her beginnings with the controversial porn paintings, initially rejected by the critical establishment, to her later large-scale photorealistic works. Essays from the exhibition's curators examine the trajectory of Minter's development and her engagement with debates over the representation of the female body. Texts from musicians, artists, writers and curators speak to Minter's wide-ranging influence: reflections from the likes of artist K8 Hardy, musician and author Richard Hell, and poet Eileen Myles, as well as an artist interview with writer Linda Yablonsky. Illustrated with hundreds of full-color reproductions, and with a complete biography and bibliography, Pretty/Dirty charts a new perspective on the career of this exciting and continually evolving artist.

Marilyn Minter (born 1948) has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, the Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, in 2009 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, in 2010. Her video "Green Pink Caviar" was exhibited in the lobby of MoMA for over a year, and was also shown on digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in LA, and the Creative Time MTV billboard in Times Square, New York.

"Pretty/Dirty" is the rare retrospective that also acts as an engrossing biography, skillfully revealing the key shifts in Minter's career, the points where the green artist transformed into skilled provocateur, the path that made her a star. (Lilly Lampe The Village Voice)

Scintillating photo-realistic paintings reveal rainbow-colored nails lined with dirt and diamond jewelry that drips with body fluids. Video works capture tattooed feet shoved into muddied heels and glossy lips that curl into a snarl. In the show, titled "Pretty/Dirty," the subversive underbelly of Minter's work is revealed in all its shimmery, gritty glory. (Anna Furman New York Magazine)

The art world has finally caught up with this forward thinker (Yasha Wallin Edition)

In these works, the images are seemingly captured in medias res of erotic motion, a voluptuously suspended moment in time. (Hannah Ghorashi ARTnews)

Like her images, “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” is seductive and glittery, an object of desire. It highlights what appears to be almost innate talent (Diane Arbus was a fan of her student work) and an equally preternatural ability to attract censure ― as well as some faithful obsessions. (Parul Sehgal The New York Times Book Reivew)

unsettling depictions of a lustful, exuberant, unselfconscious id that rejoices in a feminine sexuality that is at once pleasurable and repellent.... if there’s mistrust or unease around Minter’s images, it’s that they offer too much, and perhaps too easily, visual pleasure. (Owen Campbell American Suburb X)