n the late nineties, the artist Marilyn Minter was in exile. After a sexually explicit show called “Porn Grid” upset critics, several galleries dropped her. She turned to painting images of things that she knew existed but had never seen represented in art: a glitter-encrusted glam-rock eye, girls’ mouths with lustrous red lips and food stuck in their teeth. While she painted, the Clinton-impeachment hearings played on the radio. “I listened to every minute of it,” she said the other day. “I was thinking to myself, If I was her, I would have fucked his brains out.”
Minter, who is seventy-seven, with reddish-purple hair and glinting blue eyes, was sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the art gallery Regen Projects, in Hollywood, surrounded by a newly installed group of her realistic portraits. She begins each painting with a photo shoot, then uses Photoshop to create composites, searching for her subject’s essential characteristics. Like a sketch, the resulting image becomes a study for the painting, which she renders in layers of enamel sign paint on sheet metal. Minter did one of Monica Lewinsky, in 2023. “I met her at one of Cindy Sherman’s New Year’s Eve parties,” she said. “She was slut-shamed so bad. She’s my hero because she lived.”