(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills)
We all know the best artists are wacky and a bit nuts, with outlandish fetishes, quirks and personas. But sometimes, even they surprise each other with how crazy they can be, leading to harbouring a fascination for their peers—the more dramatic they are, the more attention they draw towards themselves and their art.
That was the case for American artist Marilyn Minter. In an article published by Interview Magazine in 2020, Minter stated, “There’s Andrew Masullo, who made earrings out of coke vials filled with sperm, and Christmas ornaments that were also filled with sperm. He’s a wonderful painter, and it was so shocking and disgusting that I thought, ‘I’m going to pay attention to this guy.’”
Given her provocative art, this coming from Minter is a pretty wild statement. She’s known for her photorealist style, where she creates highly erotic, chaotic and colourful prints that feature close-up shots of faces with eyes closed and tongues out, pressed against foggy window-like surfaces.
In other works, she combines negatives of photographs using Photoshop to create a whole new dream-like image, then layers them with enamel paint, often smudging with brushes and fingertips. For a traditional viewer, her paintings are very vulgar, blurring the boundaries between commercial and fine art while depicting porn-like imagery.
Take, for example, her series called Porn Grid, made in 1989. This series is literally blurred out on Google Images because it is a visual representation of the act of fellatio. When it came out, although Minter aimed to challenge the boundaries placed on women artists, the feminist community was outraged by the vulgarity and didn’t embrace the work.
Of this, Minter told Artforum in 2015, “I was shocked by the negative reaction to those works at the time. I was accused of being complicit in sexism and was stunned by the idea that a woman owning sexual imagery could be taken so negatively.” So, to say that there are more extreme artists than her is a pretty bold statement.
Her Andrew Masullo anecdote is both funny and surprising. Indeed, this American artist is known for his still, geometric formalism, which is almost in opposition to Minter’s works. His canvases are small, made of flat colours and abstract shapes that fit together like a puzzle. By layering unmixed block colours of oil paint side by side, he aims to explore the relationship between colour and form.
In each work, he uses a brand new tube of colour, typically primary ones, and organises them to create smooth bulbous or geometric shapes, recalling the expressionist style of Piet Mondrian. To add to the simplicity of his style, Masullo names his paintings with a series of numbers, like 5551 (2012–13), 6417 (2015), and 7070 (2017–21), leaving the viewer free to interpret what they’re seeing.
It is, therefore, even more bewildering that Minter would be so fascinated by an artist who painted these unenlightening paintings by day, which are as meek as the ones you would see in a dentist’s waiting room and would fill coke vials with sperm by night.
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