If you really have something to say, sooner or later it will be heard. And if you're lucky you'll still be alive - Marilyn Minter (American visual artist)

Marilyn Minter's sensual photorealistic paintings, photographs, and video work blur the line between commercial and fine art.

Exploring themes of sex, glamour, imperfection, and femininity, Minter's early work was in response to contemporary representations at the time, of women and women's "work". She developed this style while a student, taking a series of photos of her drug addicted mother under the tutelage of Diane Arbus. She examines the relationship between the body, cultural apprehension

about sexuality, desire, and fashion representation. Her glossy hyperrealistic paintings in enamel on metal depict blowups of make-up laden lids, eyes and feet - a gold-toothed smile, or a glistening pair of high heels splashing into metallic fluid. Minter appropriates the aesthetics of high-fashion editorials, extreme close ups of cropped bodies laden with jewels, dirt and accessories, shot through panes of wet glass, provocative angles suggest the seductive, disturbing nature of allure.

"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." - artnet
Minter's technique includes staged un-retouched photographs processed in her darkroom. Her paintings, on the other hand, are made by combining negatives digitally, creating an entirely new image. It is then turned into a painting of enamel layered on aluminum, the last layer applied with fingertips to create a softening of the paintbrush lines.

Minter has had numerous exhibitions and installments globally including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2005), the Center for Contemporary Art (Cincinnati, Oh, 2009), La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contempráneo, (Ceutí/Murcia, Spain, 2009), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland, Oh, 2010), and the Deichtorhallen (Hamburg, Germany, 2011). She had a video in the lobby of the MoMA (2010), for over a year as well as digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and Times Square, New York.

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