Pure seduction!

At the very latest since her retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2005, Marilyn Minter is counted among the major protagonists of the American art scene. Spectacular successes such as the presentation of her video »Green Pink Caviar« in the context of Madonna’s »Sticky & Sweet« tour clearly show the oscillations between pop culture and the art world characteristic of her aesthetic approach.
In her hyper-realistic works, the artist develops her very own simultaneously lascivious, overheated, and aloof visual language. Virtuoso spectacles replete with erotically charged sensuality: in her paintings and photographs, high heels, pearls, sweat, and skin are rendered in larger-than-life compositions. Minter’s works do not only captivate the viewer through their glamour and glitter, but also incorporate its morbid disintegration. the artist employs the technically powered imagery of lifestyle and porn magazines in a provocative manner and is interested in source representations, which have an »absurd« quality or, as the artist states, which women have never had the courage to address. Regardless of its thematic abundance, Marilyn Minter adheres to an inherently conceptual approach in her work. Thus, her pictorial motifs undergo serial shifts. At the same time, blazing brightness and glaring colors surging forth from the deeply dark picture planes create a pulsating emotional climate vibrant with unbridled vitality and sexuality.
Marilyn Minter may be called a feminist in the sense that she has always naturally and unswervingly followed her own path. She provokes with her shameless motifs and acts as a chronicler of the decadence of Western modernity. In Germany, where her works have never been shown before in a solo exhibition, a tribute to her artistic production spanning almost forty years is long overdue.
The book encompasses nearly 40 works, beginning with Minter’s early photographs which portray her drugaddicted mother, entrapped in depression and narcissistic beauty, in melancholy representations. Further works such as the video »100 Food Porn Commercial«, the »Food Porn« paintings as well as »Cherie« and »Flurry« are from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. All other works were created after 2000, right up to the large-format works »Glisterine« and »Chesire« from 2011, the most recent examples of Marilyn Minter’s exceptional and unique art.

Exhibition:
Deichtorhallen – Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, 30/04–12/06/2011