Marilyn Minter Steams Up the Cover of Fourteen Hills Issue 20.1
- Dec 11, 2013
- 2 min read
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.
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Marilyn Minter’s raw, glittering imagery is such a perfect fit for a literary journal — and I love the idea of turning her bold aesthetic into a giant wall piece. For my own art projects, I’ve started using rasterbator to print oversized, mosaic-style posters at home; it’s a game-changer for classroom displays or personal murals. Minter’s gritty glamour would look incredible blown up that way!
This write-up on Marilyn Minter’s “It’s Mine” is as unsettling and gorgeous as the work itself. The savage, sweaty glamour you describe makes me want to dig through the whole archive — definitely a must-read for anyone who likes their art with a side of grit. Speaking of beautifully twisted visuals, you might enjoy these cursed images for a similar jolt.
This deep dive into Marilyn Minter’s work is fascinating—her gritty, glamorous take on mother and child completely subverts tradition. The way she plays with consumption and identity leaves so much to unpack. It’s no surprise her audience keeps expanding. If you enjoy exploring visual puzzles and layers of meaning, you might also like the arrow puzzle as a playful counterpart.
The image of that sweaty mother sensually consuming the pearls off her baby’s neck is so unsettling and perfect—it completely flips the usual Madonna-and-child cliché. I love that you chose something so gritty and ambiguous from her work. By the way, I keep a free startup tool value calculator I like to share: https://growth-navigate.com/