Betty Tomkins American, b. 1945

Known for her unabashed portrayals of the female body and sexual desire, Betty Tompkins (b. 1945) has been shunned, seized, censored, and celebrated in the five decades since she first began her iconic Fuck Paintings series. A self-proclaimed “accidental dissident,” Tompkins has ceaselessly questioned the rules of representation of women’s bodies and what governs them. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, she has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style, and scale. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Centre Pompidou, Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY; Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, NY, among others. She has presented recent solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; GAVLAK, Los Angeles, CA; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium; J Hammond Projects, London; The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; and Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland; Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paolo, Brazil; Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas; and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; among others. In 2021, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain presented Betty Tompkins: Raw Material, a revelatory survey exhibition accompanied by a monograph with specially commissioned texts by Nicolas Bourriaud, Alison M. Gingeras and Géraldine Gourbe, as well as a conversation with Tompkins. In Summer 2024, P·P·O·W presented Just a Pretty Face, Tompkins’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Her work was recently on view in the group exhibition Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA.