LGDR open an exhibition of recent work by Marilyn Minter tomorrow Wednesday 12th April . Spanning three floors and six gallery spaces, this ambitious show is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since her celebrated retrospective Pretty/Dirty at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016–17.
It introduces several new bodies of work, including portraiture, and highlights Minter’s daring fifty-year exploration of beauty, representation, autonomy, and desire through a feminist, sex-positive perspective. A jaw-dropping display of jewel-toned paintings comingle with sculpture, video, photographs, and prints.
Minter approaches some of her now-familiar themes with a critical, fresh eye and fearlessly tackles the art-historical canon by reinterpreting traditional genres such as bathers, odalisques, and portraiture.
In a first for Minter’s painting practice, the exhibition debuts portraiture. For centuries, portraits have been the mainstay of the elite. Most portraits that grace the walls of museums, boardrooms, and private homes perpetuate a distorted view of history as remarkable for its absences as for its role in shaping mainstream political and civic discourse. Minter charges into this history, selecting subjects who have made impactful shifts in the cultural landscape. Previously, Minter has worked with models whose physical attributes—from freckles to body hair—celebrate unique forms of beauty and reassess what is often overlooked or erased from contemporary beauty and glamour imagery.
“I paint people I admire. They become a metaphor for the times we live in.”
— MARILYN MINTER ON PORTRAITS
“I’ve been making 21st-century bathers for about five years now…They are not caught unaware. They don’t care that you are looking at them. They have tattoos. They are unconventional beauties.
— MARILYN MINTER ON BATHERS
Minter considers her Bather paintings the catalyst for the Odalisques. Initiated in 2014, the Bathers depict female subjects in the shower from a woman’s perspective. As Minter explains, “Historically, it has been difficult to find images of naked women, painted by women. The Classicists, the Mannerists, and the Expressionists really loved portraying women bathing or grooming, or goddesses caught in the nude. But I wanted to ask the question, ‘what does it look like when a woman paints another woman grooming?’ She’s real, not idealized.” Minter’s Bathers express their own agency, often pictured behind frosty or steamed panes of glass.
Marilyn Minter, April 12th–June 3rd, 2023, LGDR, 3 East 89th Street, New York
About the artist
