Deutscher and Hackett

Highly polished, technically ingenious and with a classical understanding of theatrical staging, Marilyn Minter’s luscious enamel paintings on metal borrow and parody narrative codes from commercial fashion photography and advertising to seduce and confound audiences. Although the trailblazing artist had been producing visceral feminist artworks since the 1960s, she only found sudden fame at the turn of the millennium. Her star continues to rise as her glossy billboard-sized representations of flawed and unapologetic female desire speak to the contemporary experience. At first recycling images from the mass-media machine, in the 1990s Minter began to stage and photograph her own source imagery for paintings. This allowed her to champion underrepresented populations and to tweak common compositions such as this extreme close-up of a woman’s open mouth, from which dribbles the viscous yolk of a small, freshly broken egg – according to the artist, ‘a real fashion trope.’¹
 
Minter purposefully ‘eliminates the narrative’ within her images by tightly cropping her view of the model to just one feature.² In Quail’s Egg, 2003 the image is dominated by the plump, rouge-stained pout rendered iconic by advertisements for Revlon cosmetics in the 1950s and later disembodied as a Pop Art motif by Tom Wesselman. Throughout her career, Minter has addressed the erotic associations between food and the female body, with an open mouth becoming for her an easily legible symbol of insatiable desire, both in a sensual and consumerist sense. In Minter’s other images from the same period, a cascade of pearls tumble grotesquely from the same open mouth in an orgy of excess.
 
Although her compositions copy fashion spreads presenting perfection, Minter undermines this association by seeking out models with freckles and presenting them in unpolished, vernacular scenarios – with sweat-beaded skin, teeth smudged with lipstick, downy upper lips and shoes encrusted with street grime. Minter further emphasises the unrepresented ‘realness’ of her photographic images by including fleeting, obscuring and magnifying effects of moisture drips, spills, splashes, steam and sweat. These various droplets are then meticulously and laboriously painted in layers onto the gleaming metal surface by the artist, with the aid of a staff of highly trained assistants.
 
Minter’s work suffered from a period of institutional repudiation in the 1990s when she dared to address pornography unabashedly. Her later works, including Quail’s Egg, while still harnessing the power of sexual suggestion, ambiguously address both limbic impulses of disgust and desire. Mirroring the oscillation of her images’ surface between painted gesture and photographic exactitude is the fine line between revulsion and pleasure.
 
1. Minter, M. and Burton, J., Marilyn Minter, Gregory Miller & Co., New York, 2007, p. 26
2. Richards, J. O., Oral history interview with Marilyn Minter, 29 – 30 November 2011, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, see https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-mar... (accessed 27 May 2024)
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH