September 10 - October 17, 2008
Lawrimore Project is pleased to (re)introduce the northwest to the work of now-New Yorker, Betty Tompkins. Tompkins worked in Ellensburg, Washington in the early 70s before moving to SoHo where she has lived and worked ever since. She was included in group shows in New York at that time with the likes of Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager and Hannah Wilke, but her work failed to gain much traction in that scene. Although highly respected by fellow artists and curators, sales and reviews of her work were few and far between. Shows in France, the Houston Museum of Modern Art and the World Trade Center similarly produced similar results. She continued to work and teach, but it wasn’t until recently that her name and art began to resurface. The art world is rediscovering her thanks to the efforts of her New York dealer, Mitchell Algus who brought her early work back into the spotlight with an exhibition at his gallery in 2002. This exhibition was followed by her inclusion in the Lyon Biennale in 2003 where her paintings were shown alongside the work of Vito Acconci, Trisha Donnelly, Rodney Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Ed Ruscha and others. The recent WACK! exhibition of feminist art traveling the country (opening in Vancouver this fall) brought a whole new level of attention to her work thanks to a discussion of it in the catalog essay by Richard Meyer. We are pleased to add to the dialog and continue the rediscovery of her work with this exhibition of four recent paintings, six recent drawings, and two early works on paper from 1973.
Betty Tompkins is a painter's painter. She paints explicit scenes of sex acts and male and female sexual organs. She works from a surprisingly small library of source material culled from vintage and contemporary pornographic magazines, postcards and photographs. Within this relatively limited lexicon of images, Tompkins explores a myriad of techniques to bring her work into being and exhibit her prolific skills as a draftsperson and painter. It is here where her charged and transgressive subject matter gives way to the formal, aesthetic considerations that make her so highly regarded in painting circles. Yes, “Fuck Painting #12” is exactly what it touts itself as being, but it is also a compositional and technical wonder and works equally well as a non-objective painting on first blush. A large painting at seven by five feet, “Fuck Painting #12” is comprised of literally tens of thousands individual rubber stamps of slang words used to describe sex like "hot," "horny," "fuck," "screw," etc. What can be read as an abstraction at first, then becomes photo-realistic and finally, upon closer inspection, breaks down further to an experience of pure language.
Listen to The Stranger Podcast with Betty and art critic, Jen Graves
Contact the gallery for pricing and availability
