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Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude - MFA Boston - Exhibitions - PPOW

Betty Tompkins
Women Words Painting (Masaccio #1), 2020
acrylic on digital print on canvas
33 5/8 x 25 1/8 ins.
85.4 x 63.8 cm

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim brings together multimedia works by 12 contemporary artists who critically engage with representations of the nude in Western art history. Responding to objectification, exploitation, and erasure embedded within these images, they confront entrenched gender structures and power dynamics in work that resonates with present-day issues of bodily autonomy, agency, and accountability.

Featuring works made since 2012, the exhibition symbolically reaches into the frames—and framing—of the nude as it has appeared within encyclopedic museum contexts. Through performative gestures, archival interventions, and acts of redaction and repair, these artists challenge inherited narratives and expose the structures that have long governed visibility, authorship, and desire. From Xandra Ibarra positioning her critical Turn Around Sidepiece (2018) on a spinning marble pedestal; to Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano undermining the diaries of Paul Gauguin through photography, video, and collage; to Betty Tompkins overlaying familiar art-historical images with the often-disingenuous apologies and defenses from those accused of abuses during in the #MeToo era, nudity becomes not a site of passive display, but a critical tool for refusal, self-fashioning, and redefinition.

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude - MFA Boston - Exhibitions - PPOW

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Suzanne Valadon #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
11 x 9 3/4 ins.
27.9 x 24.9 cm

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, Switzerland. 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, France; 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. 

Exhibited Works

Exhibited Works Thumbnails
Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 8 1/2 ins.
30.5 x 21.6 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 8 1/2 ins.
30.5 x 21.6 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Mary Cassatt #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
9 x 8 3/4 ins.
22.9 x 22.2 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Mary Cassatt #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
9 x 8 3/4 ins.
22.9 x 22.2 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #6), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 15 1/4 ins.
30.5 x 38.7 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #6), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 15 1/4 ins.
30.5 x 38.7 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 8 1/2 ins.
30.5 x 21.6 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 8 1/2 ins.
30.5 x 21.6 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Mary Cassatt #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
9 x 8 3/4 ins.
22.9 x 22.2 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Mary Cassatt #1), 2018
acrylic on book page
9 x 8 3/4 ins.
22.9 x 22.2 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #6), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 15 1/4 ins.
30.5 x 38.7 cm

Betty Tompkins
Apologia (Caravaggio #6), 2018
acrylic on book page
12 x 15 1/4 ins.
30.5 x 38.7 cm

Installation Views

Installation Views Thumbnails
Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 4, 2026 to August 2, 2026, Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston