Joan Semmel: A Necessary Elaboration
In the past four decades, Joan Semmel (b. 1932) has created a place for herself in the feminist art scene with her reinvention of the female nude in paintings. Her latest exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, A Necessary Elaboration, shows nine nude oil on canvas self- portraits of Semmel’s own body through a combination of abstract brushstrokes and a vibrant color palette.
A Necessary Elaboration explores Semmel’s liberated depiction of the female nude by showing the artist’s body as an instrument of sexuality that transcends age and the inevitable physical manifestations of age. Semmel’s focus on using her paintings to freely portray her own body differentiates her work. Through her paintings, she refuses to portray the naked body as a subject created to appease to the male gaze. Through this, Semmel reclaims her own sexuality, thus exalting the topic of female sexuality and reinforcing a representation of the naked body that rebels against societal influence. This intention is executed effectively through the entire show, but especially in My Side (2018), where Semmel curates the image to show the body through an unconventional, un-sexualized angle. In this painting, the artist’s midsection is shown from the perspective of the female gaze while exhibiting details that contradict the cultural impression of what the female body must look like. The midsection is also placed in the center of the image as a way to focus viewer’s gaze on what they tend to hide. Furthermore, the artist also calls attention to her hand and its clear signs of aging, appealing once more to the female body as something that continues to deal with sexuality even as it becomes older.
Additionally, this portrayal of the female body rebels against the academic tradition not only using different points of view, but also through Semmel’s technique. By abstracting a realistic image with washes and drips in paintings like My Side (2018) and Knee Up (2017), she is dictating the way that the naked body is seen and promoting the use of non-local color and instinctive brush strokes and gestures. Semmel’s use of color and abstraction has gradually increased since New Work, her one-person exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates (2016), as well as from her With Camera series (2001–06). This increase in color and abstraction increases the interest and focus on the actual elements shown and raises an important connection between how the artist’s style matures as her best-known subject, her body, follows.
Semmel’s A Necessary Elaboration challenges the academic nude through the artist’s use of photography. Semmel incorporates a camera in her studio to capture her body before beginning to paint. This not only allows the artist to modify the academic tradition of self-portraiture to a contemporary medium, but also further facilitates her ability to be the author of her own body’s representation.
This exhibition shows how Semmel’s abstractions and modifications to the medium support her paintings. A Necessary Elaboration helps the artist to successfully critique the historic ownership that the male gaze has on the naked body and emphasize the need for female sexuality to be reclaimed by women.
