The large scale photorealistic paintings of heterosexual intercourse which Betty Tompkins made between 1969 and 1974 were practically unknown when they were exhibited together for the first time in New York in 2002. Knowledge of Tompkins’ paintings immediately broadened the repertoire of first generation feminist-identified imagery. More significantly, their materialization made manifest an unacknowledged precursor to contemporary involvement with explicit sexual and transgressive imagery. Shown at the Lyon Biennale in 2003 beside Steve Parrino’s equally wayward abstractions, Betty Tompkins’ work garnered extraordinary attention. The first painting in the series – there are only eight extant early Fuck Paintings – was acquired for the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou/CNAC in Paris. (A satisfying postscript given that the paintings were detained by customs officials and ultimately denied entrance to France in 1973; a situation that was repeated two years ago when Tompkin’s work was sent to a gallery in Japan.).........
Although Betty Tompkins’ work is not included in LA MOCA’s current Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibition, it figures prominently in Richard Meyer’s essay for the show’s catalog, Hard Targets: Male bodies, Feminist Art and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s. Meyer notes the essentialist bent of much early feminist-associated art and outlines the marginalization melded the phalocentric or coitus-concerned work of heterosexual women artists. Given the context, Tompkins’ straightforwardness and refusal to moralize is bracing. This, coupled with a ferociously deadpan humor, makes the artist’s images iconic.
Mitchell Algus, 2007 press release.
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Into Position at Baurnmarkt 1 & 9, Vienna
IMAGES a project organised by spike art magazine
One artistic work leads several different lives: as an original, a reproduction, a story and a memory. The exhibition »Images« is concerned with the idea of the reproduction as a picture. Not as appropriation, but rather as part of everyday life: the reproduction of artistic works in catalogues, books, magazines, portfolios, press folders, archives and on websites, as well as their aesthetic structures. In the variety of ways they appear, these »secondary pictures«, which are omnipresent in the art world, constitute an enormous parallel exhibition above and beyond temporal and local conditions. In this sense, these »pictures of pictures» are not actually a secondary phenomenon at all, but a separate field with its own definable significance. »Images« asserts that parallel pictures are autonomous and have an aura of their own, which is derived from the particular features of their materials, colours and dimensions, but is also based on the paths these pictures take through the imagination and by the pragmatism of their distribution.
"Handsome Young Doctor" at Cubitt, London
Saatchi Gallery Daily Magazine ...Looking at the future is unpredictably linked to looking at the past: historically disregarded artist Betty Tompkins presents two new sexually explicit paintings bearing a graphic aesthetic similar to her controversial older, highly genitally-inclined photorealistic works (see above). History books, move over; let's start again.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez www.cubittartists.org.uk/hyd.html
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