Who is Marilyn Minter?  Today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art I came across an amazing enamel on metal of a Dior rhinestone pump titled, “Strut”. I took an iPhone photo then went over to read the name, American artist Marilyn Minter.  After coming home and doing some research I realized that I was already a fan of her work for MAC, Jimmy Choo and Tom Ford…just to name a few. Look familiar?

“NEW YORK—Marilyn Minter has been a part of the New York art scene since the 1970s, though her career has been anything but a smooth ride. She made a series of now-celebrated photographic studies of her drug-addicted mother while still a student in Florida, and in the early ’80s she explored Pop-derived images that often had a sexual undercurrent. Then, at the end of that decade she painted herself straight into fevered and often bitter controversy when she began using imagery taken from porn magazines. Her infamy was exacerbated in 1990 when she produced her own TV ad, 100 Food Porn, which ran during late-night mainstream television shows. The 1990s and the early years of this decade saw her gradually refining her style and imagery so that, while still suggesting pornography, her photographs and paintings seem equally to breathe the atmosphere of high fashion (a world that she claims to know nothing about) and glamour.

Her painting technique is equally startling, employing many layers of translucent enamel paint on metal to produce an incandescent, almost hallucinatory finish. Her work came to the attention of entirely new audiences last year, when Creative Time commissioned a series of giant billboards from her that were hung in Chelsea and, a few months later, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. Now, in the summer of 2007, she’s suddenly everywhere. She is guest designer for the current issue of Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine Zoetrope All-Story, and her work is featured on the cover and in the centerfold of the current issue of the art publication Parkett, for whom she produced an editioned photograph of Pamela Anderson that immediately sold out. She shot the campaign images for Tom Ford’s new fragrance, Tom Ford for Men, which will be launched in September, and Gregory R. Miller & Co. has just published a lavish $60 monograph of her work.” – Robert Ayers for ARTINFO.com

Sources:

ARTINFO.com

artnet.com