LONDON.- Simon Lee Gallery is presenting the European premiere of New York-based artist Marilyn Minter’s video work My Cuntry ’Tis of Thee (2018). This is the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery and her first solo presentation in the UK in thirty years.

For nearly four decades, Minter’s provocative practice has dismantled the hierarchies of glamour, power, desire, beauty and sexuality that dominate contemporary consumer culture. Feminism and sexual politics provide the context for a body of work that encompasses painting, photography and video, amongst other visual and political tactics, in the creation of alluring images that unpack strategies of seduction appropriated from the media. Minter’s hyperrealist paintings of magnified body parts in high-gloss enamel on metal explore the fetishistic representation of women’s bodies throughout the history of art and in visual culture while opening up new dialogues surrounding eroticism and agency.

In My Cuntry ’Tis of Thee women write the word ‘cunt’ in various guises into condensation on a glass pane. Hidden by the semi-opacity of the steam, as the women articulate each letter their features are gradually revealed. Placing a word widely acknowledged as amongst the most offensive in the English language into the hands of each of the women in her video, Minter reclaims it from chauvinistic associations and rescues it from centuries of censorship and degradation. Although etymologically the word ‘cunt’ can be traced back to expressions relating to femininity, its meaning has been corrupted into a term of abuse that traces the misogyny inherent to Western culture’s attitude to female sexuality and the language with which it is described.

Marilyn Minter was born in Shreveport, LA in 1948 and lives and works in New York, NY. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Florida and her M.F.A. from Syracuse University. In 2015 Minter was the subject of a major retrospective entitled Pretty/Dirty at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include the Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, OH (2009); La Conservera, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Ceutí/Murcia, Spain (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2010); and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2011). Her video Green Pink Caviar was exhibited in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY in 2010, and was also shown on digital billboards on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, CA and the Creative Time MTV billboard in Times Square, New York, NY. In 2006, Minter was featured in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Further to her studio practice, Minter is an activist whose protest art has brought attention to major political issues. She currently serves on the advisory committee of Downtown for Democracy, a political action group founded by creative people that advocates to transform cultural influence into political power. In 2015, she received Planned Parenthood’s Women of Valor Award in honour of her initiative Choice Works, which raises money via auctions of contemporary artists’ work. In total, Minter has raised over 3 million dollars for the health organisation. In 2017, Minter conceived of a pop-up shop at the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with the curator and art historian Andrianna Campbell that sold artist-designed, resistance-themed merchandise, with proceeds distributed to charities of the featured artists’ choice.