MARILYN MINTER
Lehmann Maupin presents Marilyn Minter, an exhibition of new paintings by renowned multidisciplinary artist Marilyn Minter, marking her first solo exhibition in Seoul. The works on view depict vignettes of women’s lips and mouths, at once alluring and enigmatic.
March 7 – April 27, 2024
Known for her decades-long career that encompasses photography, painting, video, and installation, Minter creates imagery that engages both hyperrealist and abstract technique. Her work has often centered around corporeal qualities and practices typically omitted from the mass-media depictions of women that dominate contemporary consumer culture, such as body hair, stretch marks, dirty feet, or acts of grooming.
Rather than conceal such realities, the artist seeks to reframe these aspects of womanhood. Minter is also engaged with the art historical cannon, often using her signature lexicon to appropriate traditional tropes like the Odalisque or the Bather.
In Marilyn Minter, the artist’s compositions depict closely-cropped images of women’s faces, their mouths, lips, teeth, and décolletages adorned or open to varied degrees. In White Lotus (2023), a figure wears thick strands of pearls and beads, her open lips and jewelry obscured by steam and water droplets.
Similarly, in Gilded Age (2023), dark red lips part to reveal a jewel-encrusted grill. The imagery is intimate yet strange, luring the viewer in with the suggestion of something more. Across the exhibition, Minter’s compositions continue her bold exploration of glamor, beauty, and representation through a feminist lens.
Marilyn Minter (b. 1948, Shreveport, LA; lives and works in New York, NY) creates photographs, painting, and videos that offer nuanced representations of women. Well known for her meticulous technical mastery, Minter’s details often highlight natural corporeal qualities that are omitted in mass-media depictions of women, such as body hair and stretch marks, which she deems not only authentic but also beautiful. In her early work, Minter explored erotica—most often images created by men for men—and created new versions of erotic images solely meant for female consumption as a means of reclaiming female sexuality and desire.
This revolutionary act was met with serious criticism from leaders of the feminist movement who questioned the ability to reclaim such exploitative images. Nevertheless, Minter has unabashedly continued to advocate for women’s rights and reproductive freedoms, a stance, which for her, always includes women openly expressing their sexuality and desire—reclaiming the female body and subverting the historical objectification of women from the male gaze.