Like many modern women, Marilyn Minter has a complicated relationship with beauty. Both her personal feelings and her luminous artworks are fraught with contempt and desire for the beauty-industrial complex, and animated by attraction and repulsion for our society’s paradox-peppered continuum of physicality, sexuality, power, agency, gender-role reinforcement, confidence, and control. Now in her new exhibition of paintings, photographs, and video, Minter tackles this perennial topic through a specific art-historical lens: the bather.

Marilyn Minter, Finger Painting (2017). Enamel on metal, 66 x 60 x 2 1/8 inches. © Marilyn Minter, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

By articulating her intention to imagine a “bather for the 21st century,” Minter on the one hand evokes the early Cubism of the presciently inventive Paul Cezanne, whose formal accomplishments in painting eroded boundaries between figurative and abstract modalities, helping liberate painting from the bonds of realism. However, such a reference also addresses and problematizes the predicate that the female nude figure is most valuable as an object/trope, a vessel to contain the mostly male genius of stylistic flourishes and material or optical experiments. Minter is obstructing the nude in order to create a metaphor, room for a narrative, and ultimately, a profound sense that the women in her pictures are in on it with her.

Marilyn Minter, Last Sleepy Angel (2017). C-print, 86 x 64 1/2 inches. © Marilyn Minter, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

The result is that while Minter channels and updates the fluid boundaries of narrative, abstraction, and portraiture which Cezanne’s bathers describe, hers enact scenarios she likens more to “shower scenes,” which adds a layer of cinema and sensuality to the proceedings. Her ethereal, magical, witty, politically and sexually charged works make the perfect touchstones for the ideas at issue; and the motif of the steamed-up shower glass makes the perfect visual idiom to undergird her lexicon of steam, fluids, droplets, sparkles, glows, dewy skin, flushed lips, and lady gardens. All the models are captured in mid-shower, seen through veils of condensation and vapor, which both conceal and reveal their corporeal presence.

Marilyn Minter, Cornucopia (2018). Enamel on metal, 72 x 84 x 2 1/8 inches. © Marilyn Minter, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Her large-scale paintings are made by layering multiple negatives before applying scores of layers of enamel as delicate as steam itself. The enamel is applied by tapping, so it technically is brushwork but doesn’t leave marks or gestures. The effect at a distance is photographic, but on approach the images dissolve into a seductive riot of color and shape. In the next room, a number of enlarged photographs further explore the theme, but in their dye-sublimated chromatic saturation and shimmering surface qualities, amplify a hyperreal crispness that enfolds and alienates at the same time. If the paintings are whispers, these are siren songs.

Marilyn Minter, My Cuntry, ’Tis of Thee (2018). Video Still. HD Digital Video, Duration 9:46. © Marilyn Minter, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

The video “My Cuntry, ‘Tis of Thee” punctuates the exhibition with a mesmerizing, hilarious, and politically engaged series of vignettes in which a cast of interesting, diverse women wipe messages into a steamed-up shower glass—puns on cunt and country. It’s obvious they are having a great time, proving that humor is at least as effective a way into a complicated conversation as is beauty.

Marilyn Minter, May 19 – June 23, 2018, at Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038. www.regenprojects.com