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. She has presented recent solo exhibitions at MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain (Montpellier, FR) and The Flag Art Foundation (New York, NY, US). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA, US), Lacan , Centre Pompidou Metz (Metz, FR), A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Muzeum Susch (Zernez, CH), Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection , The Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY, US) Histórias da sexualidade , Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paolo, BR), Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics , Dallas Contemporary (Dallas,TX US) and Elles , Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR) among others. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY, US) Centre Pompidou - Musee National d’Art Moderne (Paris, FR), Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA, US), Museum of the City of New York (New York, NY, US), Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation (New York, NY, US) among others.
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