Marilyn Minter “Paintings From The 80s” At Team Gallery
From the press release:
Team Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of work by Marilyn Minter. The exhibition, entitled Paintings from the 80s, will run from the 31st of March through the 30th of April 2011. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, cross streets Wooster and Greene, on the ground floor.
This is a perfect opportunity for an audience to see the genesis of the Marilyn Minter paintings that took the world by storm in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Minter, an overnight sensation (after thirty plus years of showing in New York), has been a mainstay of the downtown scene and this triumphant return to her roots is appropriately taking place in SoHo. This exhibition will present paintings from two bodies of work: the 1986-87 series Big Girls/Little Girls, built from imagery with an almost journalistic remove, alongside works from her 1989 Porn Grids, which capture women and men engaged in what the porn industry refers to as “money shots.” All of these paintings fed off the discourses most dear to the New York art world of the eighties: appropriation, feminism, commodification, and the body.
These early paintings offer surprising insight into the current trajectory of her work, where glamour is suffused with a sinister optimism. Minter reveals the failure of the fashion image in light of blemished reality, with too-close-for-comfort details of dirt, hair, sweat, and pimples. The origins of this practice are on view here, in close-up appropriations of pornography, purposefully stylized within a male-dominated pop idiom. Additionally, the beginnings of her exploration into the worlds of glamour, fashion, and celebrity are seen in Big Girls, paintings which present the buxom Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren at a lavish dinner at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. These grandiose starlets are paired with the slyly perverse Little Girls, touching memento mori of the loss of innocence. In these pictures, two young girls are reflected and distorted in fun-house mirrors, their bodies contorted, caught in the indefinite passage from adolescence into sexual awareness.
