Joan Semmel (b. 1932) has centered her practice around representations of the body from the female perspective. Born in the Bronx, NY, she studied at The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League of New York. Trained as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she turned toward figurative painting, constructing compositions in response to censorship, popular culture, and concerns around representation. Her practice traces the transformation of women’s sexuality over the last century, emphasizing the possibility for female autonomy through the body.

In the 1970s, Semmel began exploring female sexuality with her *Sex Paintings* (1971) and *Erotic Series* (1972). In these large-scale works, she employs expressive color and loose, gestural brushstrokes to depict couples entwined in various intimate positions. Produced in a cultural landscape shaped by second-wave feminism, these series celebrate female sexuality, heralding a feminist approach to painting and representation. In 1974, Semmel radically shifted her practice, adopting her own body as the focus of her paintings. With this shift, she transformed her point of view from that of an observer—a viewer outside of the canvas—to that of both an observer and subject. Using a camera to frame her body, she created a series of paintings reflecting her commitment to marrying abstraction with realism. In the 1980s, Semmel built on these works, painting dynamic scenes featuring her camera and body reflected and refracted through mirrors.

Since the late 1980s, Semmel has meditated on the aging female physique. Continuing her exploration of self-portraiture and female identity, her recent canvases represent her body doubled, fragmented, and in motion. Her gestural technique and palette of intensely saturated and diluted hues often blur the distinction between representation and abstraction, occupying a liminal space in which flesh is transfigured into pure pigment. Approaching her own form as a site of self-expression, she challenges the objectification and fetishization of women’s bodies by redefining the female nude through radical imagery that celebrates the aging process—refuting centuries of art historical idealization.

Semmel was the subject of a career retrospective, *Skin in the Game*, presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, in 2021, followed by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 2022. In 2024, her work will be featured in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA. Semmel’s work has been presented at Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2023); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023 and 2016); The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2020); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany (2018); The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2018 and 2010); Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2016); The Museum of Modern Art, NY (2014); National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2014); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2013); Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, The Netherlands (2009); and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2008), among others. The artist’s paintings are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Tate, London, United Kingdom; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman (2008), and National Endowment for the Arts awards (1985 and 1980). She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University.

Bio:Courtesy of  Alexander Gray Associates

Joan Semmel, 2019. Photo: Taylor Miller.

An Interview with Joan Semmel

By Carol Real

Reflecting on your significant career, how has your artistic voice evolved from your early abstract expressionist works in Spain to your current self-portraits? Can you identify specific moments or experiences that were major turning points in your artistic journey?

All images courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates

Editor: Kristen Evangelista