Probably one of the rare artists in the field of photorealism, Betty Tompkins used her very unique techniques of multiple layers of spray paints over sketches & drawing to create the final large-scale artwork that highlighted feminism in a very stark sexually provocative way.
She is regarded as a modern artist who actively contributed to the Feminist Art Movement but unlike many others, she was influenced at a very early stage with promiscuous pornographic literature brought in from Asia by her first husband, that set the context for her first body of work called Fuck Paintings.
When I started the Fuck Paintings in 1969 I used porn photos that my first husband had gotten from Hong Kong or Singapore in the 1950s as my source material. My idea was that if I eliminated the hands, feet, heads and cropped in, I could get a beautiful group of forms combined with the punch of very exciting subject matter. These are from that group. Now I use photoshop to get the final file. Not the same thing at all.
Betty Tompkins found her work in sketching, photographing & mixed media representing the rawness of sexual acts as the main subjects of hyperrealism, as are shiny surfaces, animals, sublimated landscapes, close ups of films and televisions, and all that lends itself to a reformulation of the notions of interiority and exteriority.
Guy Loudmer invited Betty Tompkins to show her work at his auction in Paris in 1973, but her works were immediately seized & censored by customs officers leading to a long legal battle and the disappearance of the paintings.
In 2002 they were finally shown by the dealer Mitchell Algus in New York, then at the Lyon Biennial in 2003 in dialogue with the work of Steven Parrino. With the exception of the Centre Pompidou, which purchased one of her censored paintings, the work of B. Tompkins, rediscovered by a younger generation of artists such as Trisha Donnelly and critics such as Bob Nickas, continues to be rejected by international and historical institutions because of the perceived perverseness of raw beauty.
Betty Tompkins’ work lie at the intersection of conceptual art, photorealism and engaged art, is strongly associated with feminist artistic movements. To this day it maintains a unique place and hits the community even harder today with their visual impact, radicality, critical and thought-provoking power.
In her more recent work, Women Words, Betty Tompkins uses written descriptions out of existing quotes from popular culture, political debates and requests in which she asked to describe women in a word or a sentence. The works in Women Words borrow such words from testimonies and polemics surrounding the #MeToo movement, with which Tompkins has been strongly implicated through her work.
In an interview with Fiona Alison Duncan published in Art Basel, she spoke about her Women Words work:
I sent out an email in 2002, and again in 2013, asking for words, phrases, or stories that defined women. The four most repeated words in 2002 and 2013 were the same – BITCH, SLUT, CUNT, and MOTHER. In order to co-opt another artist’s style for the backgrounds of this series, I had to first study their work, even if I was very familiar with it. I had to really nail down how they did it.
I was so enjoying doing the Pollocks that I just stayed with it for 100 paintings and quite a few on paper! Every one of them made me feel joyous. Throwing paint around is a very physical, positive gesture. I had read many times about his anger and depressions and I just couldn’t reconcile the action with those emotions. To me, it was pure joy.Betty Tompkins