Marilyn Minter

Marilyn Minter (b. 1948, USA) is one of the most provocative and influential contemporary artists of our time, known for her raw, hyperreal explorations of beauty, power, and desire. Working across painting, photography, and video, she challenges conventional aesthetics by fusing glamour with grit, seduction with subversion.

Drawing from fashion, advertising, pornography, and art history, Minter’s work examines the way pleasure, femininity, and consumer culture collide. Her signature style—lush, high-gloss surfaces drenched in sweat, glitter, and condensation—blurs the boundaries between attraction and repulsion, reality and fantasy.

Since the 1970s, Minter has been a fearless disruptor, using her art to critique the idealized images sold to us by media and the ways in which women’s bodies are consumed, while also exposing how beauty standards shape cultural perceptions of gender and identity. Whether through her infamous 'bush paintings,' billboard interventions, or sultry video works, she continuously pushes against cultural taboos surrounding sexuality, feminism, and representation.

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, and the Brooklyn Museum, among many others. In 2016, her retrospective Pretty/Dirty cemented her legacy as a pioneer who dares to paint, film, and amplify what others shy away from.

Minter’s art doesn’t just depict beauty—it deconstructs it, reframes it, and forces us to confront our complicity in its construction. Through her lens, desire is never passive—it’s political, electric, and unapologetically bold.