Magazine Articles

Interview with Betty Tompkins | Sand Canyon Review | Manny Lopez

New York artist, Betty Tompkins, has gained great critical international attention for her iconic series of large-scale photorealistic paintings, "The Fuck Paintings." Creating her works in the late 1960's and continuing to this day, her works are described as "explicit" but as others have noted, her works are honest contemporary feminist pieces.

Handsome Young Doctor | TimeOut London | Ossian Ward

...If there is an air of fire-sale finality to the show (and it is the last in Tom Morton’s year-long curatorship), there is also a sense that – like most neat, thematic constructs – the central idea of trust begins to unravel on prolonged exposure. Sub-themes of science fiction in Peter Newman’s elegant space-blanket mandala, ‘Metatron’s Cube’, and eroticism in a pair of hardcore paintings by Betty Tompkins, only succeed in muddying the already cloudy waters. However, the ping-ponging subject matters intrigue and make this quiet series of open-ended statements a fitting end to Morton’s occasionally subversive season at Cubitt. If anything, it proves that curators aren’t to be trusted either.

Interview with Betty Tompkins | Spike Art Quarterly Issue #9 | Daniel Baumann

No Sex Please | Contemporary Magazine, Issue 59 | Martin Herbert

Martin Herbert on why art isn’t getting any

You’d never believe it, but once there was a time when American licentiousness could shock the French. It’s 1973, and the New York-based Photo-Realist painter Betty Tompkins is sending two paintings across the Atlantic for exhibition in a Paris gallery. Collectively entitled the Fuck Paintings, they are based on surreptitiously obtained hardcore pornographic magazines, feature gynaecological close-ups of penetration, and are painted in an extraordinary and gorgeous monochromatic palette that makes the folds of skin around the participants’ genitalia looked like the buckled metal of a John Chamberlain crushed-car sculpture