All images Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles | Palm Beach
Though her series of nine “Fuck Paintings” were flagged by French customs officials for pornographic content and withheld from display in 1973, they have since received belated acknowledgment and appreciation. Tompkins carefully crops out faces or body parts to excise narrative detail, enlarging the scale to fill large expanses of wall. By emptying her paintings of signifiers of race, class, time, and circumstance, Tompkins presents erotic encounters between two (or sometimes more) powerfully consonant bodies.
