February 24 - March 26, 2005

To view images of work in this exhibition, please click here.

To view a quicktime movie of this show click here.

Betty Tompkins website.

The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Betty Tompkins opening on Thursday February 24 and continuing through Saturday March 24, 2005. A reception for the artist will be held on the day of the opening from 6 to 8 p.m.

The large-scale, photorealistic paintings of heterosexual intercourse which Betty Tompkins painted between 1969 and 1974 were practically unknown when they were exhibited together for the first time in New York in 2002. A sensation, knowledge of Tompkins’ paintings immediately broadened the repertoire of first-generation feminist imagery. More significantly, the paintings’ materialization made manifest an unacknowledged precursor to contemporary involvement with sexual and transgressive imagery. Shown at the Lyon Biennale in 2003 alongside Steve Parrino’s equally wayward abstractions, Betty Tompkins’ work garnered extraordinary attention in Europe. The first painting in the series – there are only eight extant early 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).

The current exhibition carries forward the project Tompkins began in her original series and strikes off in new directions. The artist continues to make paintings with explicit sexual imagery. She emphasizes the continuity of this work by picking up the paintings’ numeration where she left off in 1974 (thus the first in the new series is Fuck Painting #10). Rather than using an airbrush, the new images are accretions of stamped words – colloquialisms mostly – for the acts and organs depicted. Tompkins developed this strategy for image production in the 1970s when her work was being held by French customs, making copies of the paintings in custody using a rubber stamp with the word “censored.”

While still photo-based, Tompkins’ new paintings have a graphic directness which is utterly contemporary. Their lush and precise paint surfaces are as crisply seductive as the soft mists of her airbrush. The new work also shows an expanded color range, taking the original series’ photo-derived black and white into new and different games with the conventions of realism and representation. While the new paintings build upon and broaden the ambitions of Tompkins’ original project, her recent drawings show the artist moving in divergent new directions; one group piquantly ups the explicitness ante, while the other, tenderly post-coital, focuses on the compromised romanticism at the emotional core of much pornography.