Ocula Report Havana Biennial 2019: Constructing the Possible 17 Apr 2019 : Federica Bueti for Ocula I first visited Havana in November 2016, a few days after Fidel Castro died, and just under a year before Hurricane Irma hit Cuba in September 2017. Since then, much has changed, including the hand-painted signs that punctuate the journey from the airport to the city centre, which today do not celebrate the revolution so much as the 'Unidad y...
Ocula Conversation Andrew Stahl and Guo Xiaohui The exhibition Beyond Boundaries at Somerset House in London (12 March–2 April 2019) marked the historic contributions of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, on the occasion of their 100th and 150th anniversaries, respectively. Spread across several rooms of Somerset House's...
Ocula Report The National 2019: New Australian Art 13 Apr 2019 : Elyse Goldfinch for Ocula The National 2019: New Australian Art features work by 70 contemporary Australia-based artists split across three venues: the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (29 March–21 July 2019), as curated by Isobel Parker Philip, curator of photographs at AGNSW; Daniel Mudie Cunningham,...
Betty Tompkins.
Known for a series of giant genitalia 'fuck paintings' (inspired by her husband's porno mags), the 72-year-old painter was once blacklisted and disregarded by radical feminists for her frank depiction of sexuality. As her new women words project - people send in words they use to describe women - makes its way across Europe, ELLE chats to the artist proving impossible to ignore.
Her art is rebellious, controversial and ballsy - literally, in the case of some of her giant genitalia paintings (hello, large-scale, up-close scrotum and vaginas).
Native New Yorker Betty Tompkins is an iconic artist and an outspoken feminist - although, it hasn't always been the case.
Tompkins has created paintings, drawings, and collages that celebrate images of graphic sexuality - with titles like Cunt, Pussy and Fuck - using pornography that belonged to her husband as references. While her early work in the 1970s was under-appreciated by art critics, and rejected by feminists, her provocative paintings now offer a timely feminist response to current issues in business, entertainment, and politics.
Artist Profile Betty Tompkins Born 1945 in Washington D.C. USA
Lives and works in New York and Mt. Pleasant, PA USA
Way back in the 1960s at the exact same moment that Chuck Close was doing it with the faces, Betty Tompkins was making enormous black-and-white photorealist paintings — not of faces — but graphically pornographic images (...), ripped from straight male porn magazines (yes, kids — people used to masturbate to still black-and-white pics back in the day; not color videos like all of you); beautiful paintings of blow jobs, female fingerings, spread-eagle women doing anything you might imagine. I remember seeing images of this work back then and thinking, Wow! I like these way more than Chuck Close; this is someone really going for it in scale, technique, and holding nothing back about image. Sadly and undeservedly — and probably because it was too scary for a woman to be handling in-your-face imagery and scale like this — Tompkins was dealt out of a little history before storming back in about 15 years ago; she's one of the strongest artists out there now, always sparing nothing, using contemporary porn (all-shaved, of course, and bigger dicks, not sure why), in a show that is a must-see for the legions of curators who are always beating the bushes to "rediscover" other "older women artists."
Jerry Salz in Vulture, 23.09.2015
Related Press Anton van Dalen’s Valuable Lessons Hyperallergic : 31 March 2019 I met Anton van Dalen more than 30 years ago and first reviewed him in Artforum (December 1988), when he had a retrospective survey, The Memory Cabinet: Paintings, Drawings, Objects 1950–1988, at Exit Art.That memorable exhibition included a childhood notebook on pigeons, which has been a lifelong interest. In 1995, I included his work in a group...
Related Press Revisiting Carolee Schneemann’s Candor and Intellect in a Previously Unpublished Interview Hyperallergic : 19 March 2019 In 1975, a beautiful, naked 36-year-old woman stood in front of 300 people and extracted a scroll from her vagina. She read it aloud slowly, unfurling it into a long, thin tendril of paper. The text was a critical diatribe by film critic Annette Michaelson, denouncing the artist's own work for being too messy, feminine, and a "diaristic...
Related Press The Reënchantment of Carolee Schneemann The New Yorker : 15 March 2019 My introduction to the work of Carolee Schneemann was an ironic rehash of her iconic 1975 work Interior Scroll. It came in a Ms. Lower East Side contest in the early nineties, an era in which I was immersed in Judson Church performance culture, as Carolee had been thirty years prior, when she marshalled 'raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint,...
Related Press CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN (1939–2019) ArtForum : 7 March 2019 Pioneering American artist, feminist, and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, known for her multidisciplinary practice that spans more than six decades, has died. She was seventy-nine years old.
