“If I paint a glass of water, people think it’s erotic,” the artist Marilyn Minter said during a recent visit to her studio in New York’s Garment District. She laughed ruefully, but they’d have reason. Outrageously beautiful and irresistibly disturbing, Ms. Minter’s increasingly monumental paintings invoke a spectrum of human desires: for sex, food, affection and, hardly least, for being seen.
Tall and stylish, with a ready wit and an open manner, Ms. Minter works from photographs reconfigured in Photoshop, creating illusionistic canvases of body fragments awash in bling. Jewels and liquid gold spill out of open mouths. Lips and tongues press against image surfaces. Silver beads morph into droplets of water that are sprayed across paintings as big as billboards — a format she has used twice. Upping the game, a fragment of a 2009 Minter video, “Green Pink Caviar,” will soon light up the Jumbotron screen on the interior facade of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. It focuses on an enormous, disembodied mouth slurping up variously colored goo. Eros is definitely on hand...