Betty Tompkins' Raw Material at MO.CO. Montpellier 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. 

"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." 

Géraldine Gourbe, "Fuck Paintings: Radical Passivity, Visual Pleasure, and Queerness," Exhibition Catalogue Essay

"Betty Tompkins’ work acts via seizure and claiming authorship as a symbolic phallus—defined in psychoanalytic terms, the phallus is as a symbol of power. To paraphrase Jacques Lacan, the phallus is something men strive to have, and women try to be. Here, the phallus takes the form of pornography-as-readymade, traditionally the domain of male power and pleasure. Tompkins uses it for her own aesthetic purposes transforming it into a powerful painted icon that transforms the found image via cropping, magnifying scale and removing colour. It is through Tompkins double seizure of the phallus—both as a litteral image of the erect penis and the signifier of mainstream pornography— that her art was perceived as a threat to even the most radical fringes of second wave feminist artists."

Alison Gingeras, "Don't Fuck with Betty Tompkins," Exhibition Catalogue Essay