Estate of Martin Wong
Reexamining the postwar art movement of photorealism and tracing its lineages in art of the present day, Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 includes more than forty artists (largely though not exclusively North American), spans the 1960s to the present, and features paintings, drawings, and sculptures. This historical, scholarly, group exhibition recovers the social art history of photorealism and complicates its meaning as a realism.
Ordinary People examines the representational politics of photorealist painting in the context of the recent rise of figurative portraiture, considering its key place in the ongoing remedial project to repopulate the museum with pictures of people and places historically excluded or disfigured. It further explores photorealism’s significance as painting of everyday life, and pulls apart the intrinsic tension between ordinary images and extraordinary artistic methods by focusing on relationships of labor, value, populism, and taste. As well, it takes seriously the myriad ways artists have deployed photorealism to entice viewers with a non-confrontational aesthetic often only to show images of painful historical events and social experiences that might otherwise be regarded as too difficult to look at, or too easy to ignore. Finally, the exhibition asserts the primacy of photorealism to critically think through the 21st-century attention economy’s glut of image production.
Installation view of Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, November 23, 2024 – May 4, 2025 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Jeff McLane.
Known for her unabashed portrayals of the female body and sexual desire, Betty Tompkins (b. 1945) has been shunned, seized, censored, and celebrated in the five decades since she first began her iconic Fuck Paintings series. A self-proclaimed “accidental dissident,” Tompkins has ceaselessly questioned the rules of representation of women’s bodies and what governs them. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, she has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style, and scale. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Centre Pompidou, Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY; Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, NY, among others. She has presented recent solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; GAVLAK, Los Angeles, CA; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium; J Hammond Projects, London; The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; and Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland; Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paolo, Brazil; Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas; and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. In 2021, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain presented Betty Tompkins: Raw Material, a revelatory survey exhibition accompanied by a monograph with specially commissioned texts by Nicolas Bourriaud, Alison M. Gingeras and Géraldine Gourbe, as well as a conversation with Tompkins. In Summer 2024, P·P·O·W presented Just a Pretty Face, Tompkins’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Installation view of Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, November 23, 2024 – May 4, 2025 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Jeff McLane.
A “documenter of the constellation of social life,” Martin Wong (1946-1999) developed innovative approaches to technique and form, creating rich surfaces and intricate details from astrology, architectural space, and various modes of language. Wong was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Tate, London, UK; among others. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017. From 2022 to 2024, the first extensive, touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez-Rubio, debuted at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, traveling to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Camden Art Centre in London, before concluding at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In dialogue with Canadian artist Paul P., Wong’s work was on view at P·P·O·W in Spring 2024 in The Midnight Sea, A Little Dash of LSD. His work was most recently showcased in Fall 2024 with the two-person exhibition Twilight Child: Antonia Kuo and Martin Wong at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA.
Martin Wong
(Untitled) Brick TV, c. 1983
acrylic on glass tv screen
11 x 18 x 17 ins.
27.9 x 45.7 x 43.2 cm
Betty Tompkins
Fuck Painting #6, 1973
acrylic on canvas
84 x 60 ins.
213.4 x 152.4 cm
Martin Wong
Untitled (brick, trapezoid), c. 1986
acrylic on board
14 x 24 x 2 1/2 ins.
35.6 x 61 x 6.3 cm
It comes as no surprise that the exhibition argues for Photorealism as a prominent contribution to a historical trajectory leading into contemporary demands for representative identity politics.
