The bias of the portrait by Jean-Paul Gavard Perret
For Betty Tompkins there are fish without mothers and seas without fish. Skinny girls look like nails. They are driven in by what makes men crazy. They don’t like singers but they are suspicious of the sex of women whose photographs by Betty Tompkins were censored for a long time in the USA.
Here she presents these incendiary photographs (at least in theory) which date from 1990 to 2024 to break certain taboos. She was not looking for the effect of an erotic or pornographic vision but pursued a form of “simplicity” whose strength of such evidence had great difficulty to be accepted.
Created with the bias of black and white Betty Tompkins proposed and still proposes a bold advance where the flesh saturated with solitude such as the visual artist there, invents less a remake than a suture under the seal of the undivided influence of the unknown. The body no longer belongs to anyone but itself since approaching full natural presences contravenes the exhibition of the starving expectations of X. And this in a feminist vision which nevertheless still remains a particular order.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Betty Tompkins : Just a Pretty Face
Until August 9, 2024
Ppow Gallery
392 Broadway
New York, NY 10013
www.ppowgallery.com
