Marilyn Minter has long had a talent for transforming the mundane into the provocative. Since March 2006 when Minter took out ad space on four billboards in Manhattan’s Chelsea district where she presented photographs of high heels kicking around in dirty water, they stayed up in Chelsea for a month! Minter also had a spot in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Now the full range of her work, from the early, painterly still lifes of household objects through the more recent, vividly imagined fashion- and beauty-inspired pieces, has been collected in a gorgeous new book. The power of Minter’s photorealistic paintings often lies in the almost pornographic proximity of her subjects. One of her most buzz-generating series, in the late 1980’s, featured images of hardcore sexual acts, but she brings that same up-close-and-personal perspective to sumptuous studies of everything from food (an egg being cracked) to designer shoes (sparkling stilettos covered in mud) to makeup (a sweaty, red-lipsticked pout chewing on a diamond necklace). My favourites? A pair of dirty feet with a green pedicure that happens to feel, thanks to the continued popularity of Chanel’s Jade and its many imitators (big fan of the Barry M nail shade), very on-trend and dirt kicking heels.
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