MARILYN MINTER: PRETTY/DIRTY

In Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, the exhibition explores in detail the myriad image choices Minter has made as a painter and photographer, the evolution of her style and technique, and her mode of production, including her organization of an unusual studio of assistants trained to create hyper-real, sometimes dizzyingly painted surfaces. Pretty/Dirty illustrates Minter’s progress from a curious youth looking critically at the domestic landscape before her to the media-savvy cultural producer whose images simultaneously define and critique our times.

From the beginning of her career, Minter has been embroiled in controversies over the relationship of her art to feminism, fashion, and celebrity. As her own profile as an artist interested in these vexed cultural intersections has grown, her work has risked looking as effortless as a mirror held up to the most supercilious aspects of today’s “bling” lifestyle. Yet Minter’s work is not merely a mirror of our culture, and this exhibition provides, for the first time, a critical evaluation of her practice as an astute interpretation of our deepest impulses, compulsions, and fantasies.

Marilyn Minter was born in 1948 in Shreveport, Louisanna. She lives and works in New York. Minter has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005, the Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, OH in 2009, La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Ceutí/Murcia, Spain in 2009, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH in 2010 and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany in 2011. Her videoGreen Pink Caviar was exhibited in the lobby of the MoMA for over a year, and was also shown on digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in LA, and the Creative Time MTV billboard in Times Square, New York.

Marilyn Minter – Pretty/Dirty’s national presentation, co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is supported by presenting sponsors Amy and John Phelan and generous gifts from Salon 94, and Lizzie & Jonathan Tisch. The Denver presentation is supported by Martha Records and Rich Rainaldi, Bruce Etkin, Toby D. Lewis, Ann Reidy, Martha & Will Tracey, and media partner artnet (www.artnet.com).