Marilyn Minter
Monday, 11 May 2009
Work from Green Pink Caviar
Green Pink Caviar is up at Salon 94 in NYC until June 13. Amazing photo-realistic paintings that are a far cry from what I normally post, but what the hell, it is my birthday, literally.
“Id and superego fight it out on the lush picture planes of Marilyn Minter’s conceptually canny painting, photography and video. Erotic attraction is the immediate effect. The centerpiece of this show, a billboard-size enamel-on-metal painting, reproduces with a lovingly sensuous touch (Ms. Minter finishes her surfaces with her fingers) a close-up, hugely enlarged, soft-focus photograph of a young female model licking beaded cake decorations off glass. Because the illusory glass is coincident with the painting’s actual surface, it is as if the model were painting from the other side, using her tongue.
Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock painting on glass comes to mind. Ms. Minter also captures tongue-painting action in her video “Green Pink Caviar.” As she languorously licks and kisses the glass, the video borders on pornography, a subject Ms. Minter has dealt with explicitly in the past.
In its hedonistic excess, however, Ms. Minter’s work also implies a Barbara Krugeresque critique of decadence in contemporary art, fashion and consumer culture. An 8-by-5-foot photograph called “Chewing Pink” shows from below a model with heavily shadowed eyes hungrily lapping up granulated pink candy, punning on powdered drugs like cocaine and heroin.
Ms. Minter’s works are as much about addiction as about pleasure. The paintings of beautiful women blowing shimmering pink bubblegum bubbles? They’re not about oral sex — they’re about the economy.” – Ken Johnson for the New York Times
via ideaslinger