Images of works by artist Betty Tompkins
Images by Betty Tompkins
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.
WHAT'S NEW:
elles@centrepompidou, Paris, France
For the first time in the world, a museum will be displaying the feminine side of its own collections. This new presentation of the Centre Pompidou's collections will be entirely given over to the women artists from the 20th century to the present day. Curated by Camille Morineau.


Revolver at COCO, Vienna
May 7 - June 21, 2009
The title of the exhibiton is derived from the word »revolve«: »to circle, to spin around«. The basic idea is to show the world(s) an artwork creates, includes or evokes. What revolves around a work of art? In »Revolver« we would like to present a layer of description usually left to commentators (critics, curators), the observer, or in the case of the artist, to the artist's statement or anecdotes. These descriptions are often quite casual: remarks at an opening, conversations, short tales that envelop the works like dust. They are often heterogenous, mixing very different aspects of a work and the biography of the artist. With »Revolver« we are trying to show an artwork's universe on its own level, its everyday life, its affinities and distances - portraits of artworks, not of artists.

There is a strong feminist tradition in dealing with issues of representation and anecdote in the past 40 years and we are deliberately trying to make a link with this tradition. We believe this approach makes apparent aspects that are crucial to the actual experience of an artwork, but are rarely represented.

Artists: Nina Beier, Anne Collier, Ruth Ewan, Adriana Lara, Lorna Macintyre, Flora Neuwirth, Mai-Thu Perret, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Anne Schneider, Betty Tompkins, Rita Vitorelli
Curated by Severin Dünser and Christian Kobald.


La Plaissir au Dessin at Musee de Beaux Arts, Lyon
10/12/07 - 1/14/08
Curated by Jean-Luc Nancy.


Into Position at Baurnmarkt 1 & 9, Vienna
9/26/07 - 10/7/07

 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.




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