ARTFORUM~Johanna Burton

Marilyn Minter
Fredericks Freiser
504 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through Oct. 11

Marilyn Minter's art exposes the seamy side of beauty and femininity, but her ambivalent approach yields something more complicated, and more seductive, than didactic critique. Her current exhibition includes several slick-to-the-point-of-sticky large-scale photographs and two hyperrealist paintings on metal. As she has in the past, Minter commandeers the visual vocabulary of fashion, then rearranges its syntax to create uncanny anti-advertisements: One richly colored
photograph (Vomit, 2003) homes in on a drooling mouth painted red and stuffed with pearls; another highlights the thick peach fuzz on an otherwise "feminine" face (Peach Fuzz, 2003). Most compelling are the paintings, which impersonate photographs so masterfully that at first glance it's hard to tell the difference. In Clown, 2003, an ambiguously gendered face tips back—eyes closed, lips, nose, and chin coated in a viscous pink that could be makeup but suggests decidedly more abject substances. At once sexy and gross, Clown operates in true Minteresque style: piquing desire, then demanding a reason why.