Brooklyn Museum Presents MARILYN MITTER: PRETTY/DIRTY, 11/4

For more than four decades, Marilyn Minter's sensual paintings, photographs, and videos have vividly questioned the complex, often contradictory perceptions of beauty and the feminine body in mainstream culture. Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is the artist's first retrospective, highlighting her technical virtuosity and examination of some of our deepest cultural impulses, compulsions, and fantasies. Now widely considered an iconic feminist artist noted for her brave and bold representations of desire, Minter was criticized in the 1990s for her pornographic and taboo-challenging imagery.

The exhibition is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong project which celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art through ten diverse exhibitions and an extensive calendar of related public programs.

Co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty will be on view fromNovember 4, 2016, to April 2, 2017. The Brooklyn Museum presentation will be the final and only East Coast venue on the exhibition's tour, marking a homecoming for the New York-based artist. The exhibition features more than 45 paintings, three videos, and over a dozen photographs made between 1969 and 2015, spanning a range of visual strategies including stark documentary photography, feminist reinterpretations of photorealism, and unabashed sexual appeal.

Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty begins with the artist's earliest artworks, from 1969 through 1986, including a rarely exhibited series of photographs that intimately capture her troubled mother's faded glamour. Pop art-inspired paintings from the mid-1980s offer a critical look at representations of the female body and celebrity, and works from the late 1980s and 1990s examine visual pleasure in visceral depictions of food and sex. The retrospective culminates in Minter's ongoing investigation of how the fashion and beauty industries expertly create and manipulate desire through images. Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty presents the evolution of Minter's style and technique, tracking her progress from concerns with the domestic landscape to her monumental and media-savvy images that simultaneously define and critique our times.

Over the course of her career, Minter has never shied away from debates over the relationship of her art to feminism, fashion, and celebrity. These vexed cultural intersections are apparent in her subjects and her unflinching approach to them; her work can appear as effortless as a mirror reflecting today's obsession with luxury and the "bling" lifestyle. Yet Minter's work is not merely a reflection of our culture, as her critical eye brings into sharp focus the power of desire, magnifying and celebrating the flaws behind superficial exteriors.

"Marilyn Minter brings her decades-long engagement with the cultural politics of feminism uniquely to life through her virtuosity as a painter and photographer. With an unflinching gaze and a sympathetic sense of humor, Minter lays bare the often ridiculous cultural norms we so often take for granted," says Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty is presented as part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum. A Year of Yes recognizes feminism as a driving force for progressive change and takes the transformative contributions of feminist art during the last half-century as its starting point. The project imagines next steps, expanding feminist thinking from its roots in the struggle for gender parity to embrace broader social-justice issues of tolerance, inclusion, and diversity. The Museum-wide series starts in October 2016 and continues through early 2018.

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