Pretty/Dirty

Pretty/Dirty is the catalog for Marilyn Minter's first full-career survey, tracking four decades of work that renders glamour and desire in almost unbearable close-up — lip gloss, sweat, spit, jewelry, and grime rendered with the same hyperreal precision.

Organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where the exhibition opened in April 2015 before traveling to the Denver Art Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, the show and its 176-page catalog span Minter's early photorealist paintings of the late 1960s through her signature enamel-on-metal paintings, photographs, and video. Essays by curators Bill Arning and Elissa Auther sit alongside contributions from Eileen Myles, Richard Hell, Nick Flynn, K8 Hardy, Colby Keller, and others, with interviews conducted by Catherine Morris and Linda Yablonsky.

Minter (b. 1948) spent decades painting from the margins of the art world's comfort with female sexuality and commercial imagery before institutional recognition caught up with her practice in the 2000s. Pretty/Dirty marks that turn, presenting the full arc from her early, once-controversial Porn Grid paintings to the glossy, maximalist canvases that made her a reference point for a generation of artists working with appropriation and the body.