Early in her career, Marilyn Minter saw the contradictions among the fantasies, fears, and desires o

Early in her career, Marilyn Minter saw the contradictions among the fantasies, fears, and desires of mainstream American culture, and sought to reflect them in her paintings. In the mid-1980s Minter painted the series, Big Girls, Little Girls series which included several monumental canvases of girls looking at their distorted reflections in funhouse mirrors. Little Girls #1 (top) and its complement, Big Girls (bottom), share concerns found in Minter’s later work, both examining the way the female body is gazed upon—from childhood to Hollywood stardom. The funhouse-style mirroring in Little Girls #1 suggests the distorting effects of traditional notions of beauty and femininity imposed by this gaze. Big Girls, combines the motif of a little girl gazing at her reflection with an image of Sophia Loren anxiously peering at Jayne Mansfield’s voluptuous breasts.  The dot pattern, or Benday dots, mimics newspaper printing techniques, in a fine-art nod to popular culture pioneered by Pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet Minter’s paintings push into territory previously unexplored by Pop art, implicitly critiquing its subject matter, which was determined primarily by male artists. The series reflects Minter’s interest in photorealism and Pop art, the use of appropriated images, and the exploration of beauty and the female body—styles and themes she would continue to investigate throughout her career. -- source link

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