In a career spanning five decades, Betty Tompkins (b.1945) has been celebrated and scorned for her provocative feminist iconography. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, Tompkins has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style and scale. P·P·O·W will present Cow Cunt #1, 1976, a monumental grisaille painting depicting a common dairy cow resting atop a vagina. This beguiling image exemplifies Tompkins' signature painting style and her enduring wit, as well as her mutual affinities for confrontation and whimsy. We will also present four new works that unify her WOMEN Words series with her signature airbrushed paintings. By combining text and image, Tompkins responds to ongoing political and cultural debates about inequity, harassment and violence. One such painting reads: “Men are better at art than women. Just look at art history.” Our presentation will highlight that tension with patriarchal conventions continues to both stymie and stimulate Tompkins' work. In 1973, two significant paintings from her Fuck Paintings series were seized by French customs and, in April 2019, Tompkins’ Instagram account was deleted after she posted an image of a catalog reproduction of Fuck Painting #1, 1969, which is now in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou. In a 2017 New York Times article, Rachel Corbett wrote, “Part of what makes Tompkins’ work so enduringly potent today, and what made it too shocking for its time, is not just its frank sexuality: It’s that the art […] seethes with lust, ego, wisecracks and profanity. [She] demanded attention the way men did — through shock and awe.” Tompkins’ recent solo exhibitions include Fuck Paintings, etc, J Hammond Projects, London, U.K. (2019); Will She Ever Shut Up?, P·P·O·W (2018); and Betty Tompkins, Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2018). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including 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.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was among the most incisive and prolific American artists of the 1980s and 90s. P•P•O•W will recreate part of Wojnarowicz’s influential 1989 exhibition In The Shadow of Forward Motion, his first exhibition with the gallery which featured many of the photographic works the artist is best known for today. Images such as Untitled (Falling Buffalos) 1988-89 present a visual metaphor for the notion of societal progress by channeling, according to the artists’ notes, “a sense of impending collision contained in the acceleration within the structures of civilization; speed of consumption; speed of transport and mixing of cultures.” Untitled (Ant Series), comprised of 6 photographs, represents tiny fire ants indiscriminately scuttling across symbols of our most cherished and agonizing social constructs: control, desire, language, spirituality, time / money, and violence. The installation also includes the mixed-media sculpture Cradle of Civilization, which depicts a small child’s chair growing in the forest. On its seat is a clay fetus clutching a battery whilst lying in a bird’s nest and, slithering between the chair legs, is a map-collaged snake. As an installation, this symbolic dreamscape exemplifies the salient cultural criticism and profound sensitivity of Wojnarowicz’s groundbreaking work. In his essay for the accompanying exhibition catalog, Felix Guattari wrote, “When everything seems to be said or repeated at this point in Art History, something emerges from David Wojnarowicz’s chaos which confronts us to our responsibility to intervene in the movement of the world.”

David Wojnarowicz’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. His work is represented in the permanent collections of major museums nationally and internationally and his life and work have been the subject of significant scholarly studies. Wojnarowicz has had retrospectives at the galleries of the Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman (1990) and at the New Museum, curated by Dan Cameron (1999). A third retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2018. The widely acclaimed exhibition has been reviewed in Artforum, The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. The retrospective will travel to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in May 2019 and the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City in November 2019. A concurrent exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s films and photographs was presented at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin in February 2019.