Marilyn Minter juxtaposes photorealistic paintings with painterly photographs, honing in on the moment where clarity becomes abstraction and beauty meets the grotesque. Through painting, photography, and video, she has created a vast body of work which focuses on the female body and its portrayal in art history and popular media. Born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and based in New York, Minter received a BFA from University of Florida (1970) and an MFA from Syracuse University (1972). Her early work—intimate, raw portraits of her mother (Coral Ridge Towers, 1969); Benday-dot paintings which pair blood-red fingernails and banal food items (Food Porn, 1990) and her mid-1990s work featuring phallic lipsticks and eroticized body parts—traces the rift between idealized images of femininity and lived experience. In 1995, she began painting from her own manipulated photographs rather than appropriated images. In glossy enamel on metal, these images of women’s bodies commingle glitter and crystals with sweat, spit, and grime, embracing the body’s mess. In recent years, the artist has turned her attention to portraits as well as 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.

Minter has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Pretty/Dirty (2015–16) at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California; and the Brooklyn Museum; Nasty Woman, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2020); and All Wet, MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier, France (2021). In 2006, she was featured in the Whitney Biennial. Her work resides in such collections as Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Tate, London; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Her many honors include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation (1998) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2006).