NEW YORK, NY.- P·P·O·W is presenting an online viewing room in conjunction with Betty Tompkins' Raw Material at MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain. On view through September 5, Raw Material is a revelatory survey spanning the formidable figurative painter's career from the 1960s to present. Known for her unabashed portrayals of the female body and sexual desire, Tompkins has been shunned, seized, censored and celebrated in the five decades since she first began her iconic Fuck Paintings series. Since then, she has ceaselessly questioned the rules of representation of women's bodies and what governs them.

As critic Géraldine Gourbe writes in her essay for the accompanying exhibition catalogue, "Looking at the Fuck Paintings today offers us a black box, the intangible memory of a process of invisibilization, which was motivated at the time, for diametrically opposed reasons, by conservative morals and feminist opprobrium. In both instances, these prejudices prompted harsh social and aesthetic sanctions against the artists involved. The “perverse” aspect of Tompkins’ paintings shattered the entire historical and cultural construct of implicit and explicit censorship, and we are now witnessing this legacy today."

In a career spanning five decades,  Betty Tompkins (b. 1945) has been celebrated and scorned for her provocative feminist iconography. Tompkins has presented solo exhibitions at The Flag Art Foundation, New York; J Hammond Projects, London; Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland; and P·P·O·W, New York. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including She Says: Women, Words, and Power, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA (2021); Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paolo, Brazil (2018); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2016); and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), among others.