Marilyn Minter, Paintings from the Eighties Opening at Team Gallery.

Currently at Team Gallery in Soho, Marilyn Minter’s Paintings from the Eighties showcase the artist’s work from long before her artworld stardom took off around the time of the Whitney Biennial in 2006.  The show opened on Thursday, April 1st to a large crowd and presented work from two series she produced during the 80’s- Big Girls/Little Girls and Porn Grids.

The artist, Marilyn Minter (middle), with Laurie Simmons and friend

More text and images after the jump…

Marilyn Minter, Little Girls (1987)

Marilyn Minter, Porn Grids (1989), via Team Gallery.

Both Big Girls/Little Girls and Porn Grids deal with issues of femininity and subjectivity. In the former, ben-day dot images on enamel compose a feminist homage to Warhol, questioning representations of beauty through the eyes of young girls who attempt to make themselves in the image of their idols. The works contrast prints of film starlets with those of young girls considering their own distorted reflections in funhouse mirrors, emphasizing the influence these images have had on today’s women. Conversely, in Porn Grids, the female (and occasionally male) subjects remain mostly faceless, in viscous paintings depicting stills of “money shots” from pornography. If Big Girls/Little Girls speak to Warhol, these paintings echo Pollock, but with white splatters a little more pointed in their referents.

Marilyn Minter Gimme (2008), via Salon 94.

Marilyn Minter is known for sexually provocative work that draws from both pornography and high fashion.  Her work has evolved since making the pieces shown at Team, and she is now most well known not only as a painter but also as a photographer and filmmaker whose work generally depicts the female body interacting with other materials, whether it be in a video shot though glass of a heavily made up mouth licking colorful foods off of the screen, as in Green/Pink Caviar, or her own heeled feet splashing in dirty water, as in a series of billboards that were displayed in Chelsea to coincide with the 2006 Biennial. Minter’s work uses repeated motifs of fetishistic objects and actions- extreme close ups of skin, hair and mouths rendered in seductively lit slow motion.  Her images, while glamourous, also incite an element of the grotesque that often comes along with that which is fetishized. Minter has has recent solo shows at the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art and Salon 94. Her show at Team will be open until April 30th, 2011.

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Team Gallery]
Green/Pink Caviar [Artist’s Website]