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.
Read MoreSemmel'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.
