Joan Semmel is an American feminist painter, renowned for her large-scale nude self-portraits painted from the artist's perspective, either looking down or through a camera lens. Her practice, spanning over six decades, has continually challenged the fetishization of women's bodies in popular culture, insisting upon the validity of the naked female body in its own right.
Read MoreBorn in New York in 1932 Semmel began her artistic studies at the Cooper Union, before completing a BFA at the Pratt Institute in 1963. Moving to Madrid with her young family the same year, Semmel established herself as an Abstract Expressionist, exhibiting her paintings in Spain and South America.
Her move to figuration came when she returned to New York in 1970 and divorced from her husband; shocked by the sexualised images of women she saw on American newsstands, and spurred on by the burgeoning feminist movement, Semmel began to incorporate the female body into her work to counter the exploitative and diminishing images of women she saw in the media.
Around this time, Semmel became involved with other feminist artists, including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Nancy Spero, and Louise Bourgeois, all of whom had started to employ images of the female body in their work. She was also active in several groups dedicated to gender equality in the art world, including Fight Censorship (FC), Women in the Arts (WIA), and the Art Workers Coalition (AWC).
Since the 1970s, Joan Semmel's paintings have challenged popular representations of women's bodies, and their attendant narratives of sexual passivity or male utility, by depicting the female body and female desire in a frank, unidealised manner. Semmel's primary strategy in doing so has been to use her own body as her subject matter, which she has continued to depict over the course of her career as her body has aged.
Semmel's figurative practice began with her painting images of heterosexual couples having sex, rendered in non-naturalistic colours. When no New York galleries would exhibit her work, Semmel rented her own exhibition space to display her early Erotic Series (1970–1973), drawing attention from critics.
Semmel also began to incorporate her own body into her paintings in the early 1970s. These cropped, realistically rendered self-portraits depict Semmel's nude, supine body as seen from her own perspective, and sometimes feature a male partner, such as in Intimacy and Autonomy (1974).
Responding to the fetishization of women's bodies in popular media, Semmel's paintings stand as assertions of bodily autonomy, expressing a desire to represent the female body, not as an object or ideal, but, as the artist has stated, 'the idea of myself as I experience I myself.'
In the 1980s, Semmel expanded her figurative practice in several series that locate the body within a broader context. Semmel's Beach series, like her 'self-images', depict the artist's body from her own view lying down on a beach, but this time feature other figures populating the background. Between 1988 and 1991, Semmel produced her Locker Room series, based on photographs taken in women's changing rooms. Semmel's own body is notably absent in these paintings, save for the images such as Mirror Mirror (1988), where her body is doubled in a mirror, naked, with a camera held to her face.
Semmel has continued to paint self-portraits of her naked body as she has aged, charting the inevitable changes that befall the body over time. Her series Transparencies (2014–Ongoing) recalls a technique used in an earlier series, Overlays (1992–1996), in which Semmel superimposes faint images of herself over a pre-existing depiction of her body. Doubling, sometimes tripling, herself within a single canvas, these uncanny iterations act as meditations on memory and the passage of time – and, importantly, do not shy away from the ageing body as a legitimate subject for artistic enquiry.
In 2014, Semmel was selected as a National Academician of the National Academy Museum, New York and, in 2013, was awarded the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award.
Joan Semmel has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions. The first major retrospective of her work, Skin in the Game, was held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia in 2021 and featured 64 artworks drawn from nearly six decades of her practice.
Solo exhibitions include: Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades, Alexander Gray Associates, New York (2015); Through the Object's Eye: Paintings by Joan Semmel, University Art Gallery, State University of New York, Albany (1992); and Erotic Series, 141 Prince Street, New York (1973).
Group exhibitions include: Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary (2016); Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); WACK! Art and the Feminist Movement, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Museum of the Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; MoMA PS1, New York; and Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2007).
Semmel's work is included in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate, London; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others.
Semmel's website can be found here.
Alena Kavka | Ocula | 2022
