Marilyn Minter

Marilyn Minter (b. 1948) deftly explores American culture’s pathology of glamour through painting, photography, and video works which focus primarily on the female body and its treatment in popular media. From early bodies of work, including Coral Ridge Towers, a critically lauded series which captured the artist’s mother in shocking intimacy, to her Food Porn paintings, which anticipated the contemporary aestheticization of food and consumption in the digital age, Minter’s images are always powerfully urgent. In striking Photorealist paintings and sexually charged photographs, Minter abstracts her subjects as she reimagines them at the cusp of beauty.

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. In 2021, this series was the subject of a solo exhibition, Marilyn Minter: All Wet, at MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier (FR), with an accompanying catalogue.

The artist has been the subject of many solo museum exhibitions, including a recent presentation of her video practice, Smash, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Westport (CT) in 2021. Minter’s work was also the subject of a solo exhibition, Nasty Woman, at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art (GA) in 2020. From 2015 through 2017, her retrospective, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (TX); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (CO); the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (CA); and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (NY). She was also included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Minter is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (2006) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1998).

Minter’s work is in the collections of many museums globally, including the MIT List Center, Cambridge (MA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY); the Perez Art Museum, Miami (FL); the Tate Modern, London (U.K); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (NY); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY), among many others.