Marilyn Minter:

Pretty/Dirty

For over three decades Marilyn Minter has produced lush paintings, photographs, and videos that vividly manifest our culture’s complex and contradictory emotions around the feminine body and beauty. Her unique works—from the oversized paintings of makeup-laden lips and eyes to soiled designer shoes—bring into sharp, critical focus the power of desire. As an artist, Minter has always made seductive visual statements that demand our attention while never shirking her equally crucial roles as provocateur, critic, and humorist. Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty featured over 25 paintings made between 1976 and 2013, three video works, and several photographs that show Minter’s work in depth. 

The exhibition explored in detail the myriad image choices Minter made as a painter and photographer, the evolution of her style and technique, and her mode of production, including her organization of an unusual studio of assistants trained to create hyper-real, sometimes dizzyingly painted surfaces. Pretty/Dirty illustrated Minter’s progress from a curious youth looking critically at the domestic landscape before her to the media-savvy cultural producer whose images simultaneously define and critique our times.

Marilyn Minter was born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana and went on to receive her BA from the University of Florida at Gainesville and an MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati; La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Ceutí/Murcia, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany. In 2006, Minter was included in the Whitney Biennial, and in collaboration with Creative Time she installed billboards all over Chelsea in New York City. She currently lives and works in New York, New York.