Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_01_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_02_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_03_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_04_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_05_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_06_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_07_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_08_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_09_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_10_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_11_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_12_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_13_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_14_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_15_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_16_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_17_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_18_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_19_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_20_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_21_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_22_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_23_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_24_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_25_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_26_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_27_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_28_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_29_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_30_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_31_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_32_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_33_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_34_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_35_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, November 04, 2016 through April 02, 2017 (Image: DIG_E_2016_Marilyn_Minter_Pretty_Dirty_36_PS11.jpg Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2016)
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
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Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
For more than four decades, Marilyn Minter’s (American, born 1948) seductive visual statements—from oversized paintings of physical flaws to mesmerizing videos of makeup-smeared models—have demanded our attention. Bringing the power of desire into sharp focus, Minter has never shirked her equally crucial roles as provocateur, critic, and humorist.
Minter’s career has been characterized by controversies over the relationship of her art to feminism, fashion, and celebrity. Her work can appear as effortless as a mirror held up to the trappings and entrapments of luxury. Yet, as an artist interested in these vexed cultural intersections, Minter maintains a critical eye on the commercialization of desire and on complex and contradictory views of women. The first retrospective of her work, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty presents the artist as an interpreter of our deepest impulses, compulsions, and fantasies.
The exhibition begins with photographs from 1969, continues with Pop art–influenced works from the mid-1980s, and culminates in Minter’s ongoing investigation of what some consider the “dirty” truth of the beauty industry’s impact on cultural perceptions of sex and the body. Exploring the evolution of Minter’s style, scale, and materials, the exhibition tracks her progress from an early engagement with the domestic landscape to her monumental and media-savvy images that simultaneously define and critique our times.
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong series of ten exhibitions celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Leadership support is provided by Elizabeth A. Sackler, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Calvin Klein Family Foundation, Mary Jo and Ted Shen, and an anonymous donor. Generous support is also provided by Annette Blum, the Taylor Foundation, the Antonia and Vladimer Kulaev Cultural Heritage Fund, Beth Dozoretz, The Cowles Charitable Trust, and Almine Rech Gallery.
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Exhibition co-curators are Bill Arning, Director, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Elissa Auther, Windgate Research Curator, Museum of Arts and Design and Bard Graduate Center. The Brooklyn presentation is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator, and Carmen Hermo, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.
This exhibition is supported by generous grants from Gregory R. Miller & Co.; Amy and John Phelan; Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn/Salon 94, New York; and Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch. Generous support for the Brooklyn Museum presentation is provided by The Fuhrman Family Foundation; Amy and John Phelan; the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc.; Mary Bucksbaum Scanlan and Patrick Scanlan; the Taylor Foundation; Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch; The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; Salon 94, New York; Maharam; Naomi Aberly and Larry Lebowitz; Sherry Brous and Douglas Oliver; Richard Edwards and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Christina and Emmanuel Di Donna; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; Linda and Gregory Fischbach; Danielle and David Ganek; Dominique Lévy and Dorothy Berwin; the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation; Regen Projects; Richard B. Sachs; Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation; Fern and Lenard Tessler; Isabella and Theodor Dalenson; Emily Glasser and William Susman; Gregory R. Miller and Michael Wiener; and Richard and Beth Heller.
These works represent Minter’s early investigations of the world around her, including the domestic environment, the artist’s studio, and printed mass media, beginning with photographs made in 1969 and culminating in paintings from 1986. These formative works introduce the artist’s interest in photorealism and Pop art, the use of appropriated images, and the exploration of beauty and the female body—styles and themes she has investigated throughout her career. Early on, Minter saw the contradictions among the fantasies, fears, and desires of mainstream American culture, and sought to reflect them in her paintings.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Minter created several series of paintings that take the visual representation of food and sex as their subjects. These images are appropriated from both cooking and pornographic magazines. In them, Minter explores, among other issues, forms of visual pleasure and the appetites they incite. The paintings combine Pop art–inspired Benday dots with dripping paint in a sticky, visceral depiction of raw food and bodily fluids.
While the food images were well-received when they were first exhibited, the pornographic paintings—risqué imagery for a painter even today—produced a firestorm of criticism. The controversy centered on feminist debates about, on the one hand, pornography’s exploitation of the female body and, on the other hand, the pleasure produced by sexually graphic art. Though mainstream feminists labeled these carnal portrayals misogynist, the paintings’ unabashed declaration of erotic desire was championed by a burgeoning sex-positive movement that defended consensual sexual activity as healthy and pleasurable.
Following her work with pornographic imagery, Minter turned a critical eye toward blemishes, imperfections, and grime through close-ups of isolated body parts. She reintroduced photography into her practice by orchestrating shoots with models and using the resulting images, layered and spliced into one composition, as guides for paintings. This in turn generated commissions from the fashion industry, advancing her abiding interest in the representation of beauty, glamour, and the attendant desire for perfection—however unattainable and damaging—it fosters in viewers.
In fashion photography, presumed “defects,” such as stubble, pimples, freckles, sweat, and misapplied makeup, are digitally corrected and removed. By contrast, these perceived imperfections are Minter’s subject, and she revels in their realness. In highlighting these raw views of the body, Minter is also reversing the centuries-long function of painting as capturing an idealized image.
The photographs, paintings, and video shown here focus on licking, dripping, and devouring mouths. The references are wide-ranging, commenting on American culture’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for glamour and stimulation. Works like Orange Crush and Pop Rocks borrow their titles from sweet-tasting junk foods that excite the tongue. In the adjoining room, the model in Torrent holds a string of pearls in her teeth. In Green Pink Caviar, a model’s mouth slurps and drools liquids in a swirling, seductive video.
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September 1, 2016
For more than four decades, Marilyn Minter’s sensual paintings, photographs, and videos have vividly questioned the complex, often contradictory perceptions of beauty and the feminine body in mainstream culture. Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is the artist’s first retrospective, highlighting her technical virtuosity and examination of some of our deepest cultural impulses, compulsions, and fantasies. Now widely considered an iconic feminist artist noted for her brave and bold representations of desire, Minter was criticized in the 1990s for her pornographic and taboo-challenging imagery.
The exhibition is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong project celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a decade of feminist thinking at the Brooklyn Museum.
Co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty will be on view from November 4, 2016, to April 2, 2017. The Brooklyn Museum presentation will be the final and only East Coast venue on the exhibition’s tour, marking a homecoming for the New York–based artist. The exhibition features more than 45 paintings, three videos, and over a dozen photographs made between 1969 and 2015, spanning a range of visual strategies including stark documentary photography, feminist reinterpretations of photorealism, and unabashed sexual appeal.
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty begins with the artist’s earliest artworks, from 1969 through 1986, including a rarely exhibited series of photographs that intimately capture her troubled mother’s faded glamour. Pop art–inspired paintings from the mid-1980s offer a critical look at representations of the female body and celebrity, and works from the late 1980s and 1990s examine visual pleasure in visceral depictions of food and sex. The retrospective culminates in Minter’s ongoing investigation of how the fashion and beauty industries expertly create and manipulate desire through images. Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty presents the evolution of Minter’s style and technique, tracking her progress from concerns with the domestic landscape to her monumental and media-savvy images that simultaneously define and critique our times.
Over the course of her career, Minter has never shied away from debates over the relationship of her art to feminism, fashion, and celebrity. These vexed cultural intersections are apparent in her subjects and her unflinching approach to them; her work can appear as effortless as a mirror reflecting today’s obsession with luxury and the “bling” lifestyle. Yet Minter’s work is not merely a reflection of our culture, as her critical eye brings into sharp focus the power of desire, magnifying and celebrating the flaws behind superficial exteriors.
“Marilyn Minter brings her decades-long engagement with the cultural politics of feminism uniquely to life through her virtuosity as a painter and photographer. With an unflinching gaze and a sympathetic sense of humor, Minter lays bare the often ridiculous cultural norms we so often take for granted,” says Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is presented as part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, which celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art through ten diverse exhibitions and an extensive calendar of related public programs. The project recognizes feminism as a driving force for progressive change and takes the transformative contributions of feminist art during the last half-century as its starting point. A Year of Yes imagines next steps, expanding feminist thinking from its roots in the struggle for gender parity to embrace broader social-justice issues of tolerance, inclusion, and diversity. The Museum-wide series starts in October 2016 and continues through early 2018.
Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Exhibition co-curators are Bill Arning, director, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Elissa Auther, Windgate Research Curator, Museum of Arts and Design and Bard Graduate Center. The Brooklyn presentation is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator, and Carmen Hermo, Assistant Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.
This exhibition is supported by generous grants from Gregory R. Miller & Co.; Amy and John Phelan; Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn/Salon 94, New York; and Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch. Generous support for the Brooklyn Museum presentation is provided by The Fuhrman Family Foundation; the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc.; the Taylor Foundation; Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch; Naomi Aberly and Larry Lebowitz; Richard Edwards and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Christina and Emmanuel Di Donna; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; Linda and Gregory Fischbach; the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation; Richard B. Sachs; and Emily Glasser and William Susman.
The accompanying book is published by Gregory R. Miller & Company, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. It contains essays by the organizing curators, Bill Arning and Elissa Auther, an interview by Linda Yablonksy, and additional essays by Eileen Myles, Nick Flynn, Jenni Sorkin, Colby Keller, Neville Wakefield, K8 Hardy, Richard Hell, and Catherine Morris.
Leadership support for A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum is provided by Elizabeth A. Sackler, an anonymous donor, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Calvin Klein Family Foundation, and Mary Jo and Ted Shen. Generous support is also provided by the Taylor Foundation, the Antonia and Vladimer Kulaev Cultural Heritage Fund, and The Cowles Charitable Trust.
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