In/Visible: Betty Tompkins: On Making Fuck Paintings Since 1969 (NSFW Image Included)

Fuck Grid #34 (2007), pencil on paper, 17 by 14 inches

Betty Tompkins began making Fuck paintings in 1969. It was the height of minimalism and conceptual art, so she thought she'd try calling them Joined Forms. She eventually dropped the act and just called them Fuck paintings, adding Dick paintings and Cunt paintings, too.

What keeps a woman working on photorealistic paintings of hard-core heterosexual pornography for 40 years? Well, she did take a break in the late 70s and early 80s to make works that were all text, of which she says: "I bored myself silly, so I went back to sex."

After a quick rise to her first international show as a very young artist, she was censored, her works held up in French bureaucracies for a year. Then, for years—from about 1973 to about 2002—she was pretty much persona non grata in the art world. What accounts for the recent comeback? She's not sure exactly, but she's not complaining.

Her works can be surprisingly tender; they can also be harsh, created by stamping words on the canvas in the forms of body parts. With such limited subject matter, the stylistic range is broad. Her show of paintings and drawings (especially two exquisite drawings created in the 1970s with a Dremel tool, which she only knew to be called a "flexible shaft," causing some great innocent doublespeak), is at Lawrimore Project through Saturday, October 18.

Her own web site is here.

Here is an image she alludes to in the podcast, her single homage in all these years to the breast. This one is called Fuck Grid #32: