#prettydirtybkm

Marilyn Minter fell in love with enamel as soon as she touched it in the mid-'80s, and has been painting with it ever since. On the appeal of using the material she says, "It's mostly about visual pleasure for me. The flare [from enamel] won't stay in my work forever, but for now, I find that it helps create compelling and exciting compositions. The flares and other visual obstructions—water, cracked glass, graffiti—become subjects in and of themselves." 

Photo by Marilyn Minter for Glamour Magazine 2007

post production by retouchers at 451imaging 

Marilyn Minter currently has an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum

For more than four decades, Marilyn Minter’s 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.

The first retrospective of her work, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty presents the artist as an interpreter of our deepest impulses, compulsions, and fantasies. 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.

This is the final week to catch Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, see it before it ends Sunday, May 7.

"I sort of feel like if you’re slightly marginalized, you’re hungrier, and you can take more risks and be more playful.” —Marilyn Minter

“I've always worked from images that already exist in our culture, and I just tweak them—I photograph my vision/interpretation of things that already exist, and I take it to the extreme. And then I make paintings or videos.” —Marilyn Minter

In creating the paintings, Marilyn Minter uses Photoshop to montage and layer multiple digital photographs into one composition, which she translates into one work. The source image—a composite of many different details—is used as a guide and reference, rather than a projected map. The artist, along with her assistants, makes numerous adjustments as the painting evolves, from changes in hue to tweaks of the composition. A single fingertip applies the final layer of enamel paint, giving a lustrous glaze.

"I've always tried to be very seductive. I want the paintings to draw you in. But I don't want to just glamour you. I want to make an image of the time we live in and reflect it back." —Marilyn Minter

Many of Marilyn Minter's more recent works appear obscured by glass and layers of steam or graffiti. In works like Not in These Shoes, Minter plays with these registers of perception, blurring the lines between abstraction and realism, painting and photography.