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American | Contemporary

b. 1948

Marilyn Minter is a contemporary American artist whose personal brand of Photorealist painting examines contemporary notions of beauty. Minter appropriates the aesthetics of high-fashion editorials, to depict cropped bodies laden with jewels, dirt, and couture accessories, as seen in her work Frostbite (2006). “When I think about my work, I mostly think about the paradox that goes on when you look at these images," she has said. “How much pleasure glamour gives us but at the same time, how we know we'll never look like that, and even [models] don't look like that. There's this constant distortion that's happening between all of us—men and women—there's a sense of failure. But at the same time, all of this pleasure.” 



Born in Shreveport, LA in 1948, and went on to receive her BA from the University of Florida at Gainesville and an MFA from Syracuse University in 1972. Moving to New York in 1978, the artist utilized her skills in both in photography and painting to capture banal scenes featuring nudity, food, and fashion. Minter first found artistic popularity in the early 1990s, and has been featured in a number of major solo exhibitions, including “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty,” which travelled from the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston to the Brooklyn Museum between 2015 and 2016. The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.

Marilyn Minter

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