Marilyn Minter Steams Up the Cover of Fourteen Hills Issue 20.1

Imagine our excitement when Marilyn Minter generously gave Fourteen Hills access to her entire body of work for Issue 20.1. How does one pick from a sea of glittering mouths, broken glass, amplified freckles, and open pores? We delved into the gritty glamour and selected “It’s Mine.”

Minter’s painting takes the subject of mother and child, and turns it upside down. Instead of depicting an image that reinforces tropes of classic nurturing love, we saw a savage exchange in a polished world. The faceless cherub baby seems to have an over-developed arm with shadow veins. The color contrast of the red lips, black eyelashes and opalescent jewels of he mother, who is sweaty, perhaps as if in the throws of passion, sensually opens her mouth and consumes the luminous pearls around her baby’s neck. Rather than being purely feminine, we saw a muscular neck and a phallic nose.

Minter’s work is filled with themes of consumption that are intimately connected to identity; a perfect compliment to the poetry and fiction inside our Issue 20.1.

Minter, who has been painting since the 70’s, achieved commercial success in 2005 after her solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since then, she has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including the Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, OH in 2009; La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Ceutí/Murcia, Spain in 2009; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH in 2010; and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany in 2011.

A retrospective of her career will be exhibited in 2015 at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, then travel to other cities. At 65, Minter’s art and audience only continue to grow.