Regen Projects is pleased to present Marilyn Minter’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. In four distinct but related groups of paintings—large-scale portraits, the Odalisque and After Guston series, and a selection of her iconic magnified mouths—Minter’s hyperrealist approach simultaneously subverts and pays homage to art historical conventions of portraiture and representation. The works on view exemplify both the technical sophistication of the artist’s enamel painting process, which she has spent decades refining, and the personal immediacy of her relationship to her subjects and artistic antecedents.

Minter’s paintings of Nick Cave, Jane Fonda, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons reflect the productive tension between her perfectly finished surfaces and her subjects, which are imbued with a certain freedom. Sherman, ever the master of wigs and disguises, is here distinguished by a singular leopard-print glove, a vaguely old-fashioned signifier of glamour and costuming. Koons pushes at the glass of the portrait’s studio set up with an almost manic intensity––the first person in twenty years to do so, according to Minter. Behind the layers of technical precision in these portraits lies an exuberance at odds with the composed, formal conventions of traditional portraiture: Fonda’s portrait, as bold as it is irreverent, reflects a life of activism, while Cave joyously dances.

This balance between exquisite material execution, personal homage, and art historical excavation continues in Minter’s Odalisque portraits, reclaiming the canonical genre in which a woman is represented mostly or completely nude in a reclining position. Frequently depicted as a passive object and a recipient of the gaze absent of agency, the odalisque has proven a fruitful subject for both critical intervention and artistic reinterpretation. Minter is thus in dialogue with both aesthetic and intellectual lineages in which she embeds her own formal and personal concerns. In Lizzo Odalisque (2023–25) the singer poses prone, in heels and lingerie, holding her iPhone as a contemporary accessory that replaces traditional mirrors, fans, or bouquets. While odalisques are usually depicted supine and thus open to a consuming gaze, Lizzo is not vulnerable. Rather, she is fully visible, but on her own terms. The selfie-like pose further underscores the reclamation of her own image, while her substantial necklace bears the logo of her clothing brand YITTY––a source of cultural and commercial power that extends beyond her artistic production. In Padma Lakshmi Odalisque, the author and chef takes another non-traditional pose. Sitting fully erect, gazing directly at the camera, ambiguously half-clothed, Lakshmi consumes a ripe orange, surrounded by more fruit and a smashed cake, painted in a style that simultaneously conjures 17th-century Northern Renaissance still lifes and 18th-century French portrayals of antediluvian abundance. Not only does Lakshmi’s assertive gaze invert the traditional power dynamic between viewer and subject; like Lizzo, she is enjoying the fruits of her own labor.

If the portraits reflect Minter’s connection to individuals and their representation, the After Guston works are an exploration of her artistic analogues and interlocutors. The intimacy of the portraits is interpersonal; the intimacy of the After Guston works is one of a shared language between artists. Minter expands on her established lexicon of shoes and mouths, incorporating Guston’s emblematic cigarettes, paintbrushes, lightbulbs, and hoods. In addition to their shared language of objects, Minter cites Guston in explicitly political terms, drawing a direct parallel between the white hoods of the Klu Klux Klan and the red caps of the MAGA movement. The acronym MAGA is sometimes, but not always clearly legible on Minter’s hats, because it does not always need to be. Like the Klan hoods, the caps (red, bulbous, omnipresent) have become an icon unto themselves, one that elides and even obviates language.

By taking on some of the most conventionally rigid genres in painting, Minter brings a contemporary reading to an ancient conversation, mastering its vocabulary even as she reworks and transforms it, bringing it into her own lexicon and offering her own set of concerns.