Beautifully tactile and sensitive paintings by Marilyn Minter depict sensuous beads of water trickling down magnified body parts, gritty glitter smudged over sweaty skin and sumptuous flesh obscured by bubbles and glass. Puckered and blotchy, freckled and sweaty, Minter’s subjects remain alluring despite, and because of, their imperfections. Every dazzling flaw is lovingly rendered in all its sticky, grotesque charm and dirty glamour. Working from photographs she takes and develops herself in a darkroom, Minter’s paintings are created with layers of enamel paint on aluminium, resulting in iridescent images that pulse with light and contrasting textures. The American artist crops and combines her images on photoshop giving her photorealistic work a strangely surreal tone and making familiar objects and body parts seem alien and disjointed. The last layer of paint applied by Minter and her assistant is applied by fingertips in order to soften the brush-marks below. Minter has also taken images from porn and manipulated them creating paintings that ooze with tactile sensation and voluptuous sensuality. Using images traditionally used to exploit women, Minter believes that they take on new meaning when they are depicted by the same sex and that sexual imagery should be used for female pleasure as well as male titilation. Rather than diluting the sexual energy of the original images, Minter has examined the most voluptuous and animalistic aspects of porn in order to illustrate our deepest fantasies which, by definition will never be politically-correct.
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