At 93, Joan Semmel Continues to Assert the Female Gaze |
Transitions (2012) by Joan Semmel at the Jewish Museum in New York. Photo: Fred Voon for Observer
In 1973, when no gallery in New York would show her vivid paintings of bodies in various configurations of sex, Joan Semmel created her own space. She poured her savings into renting a unit on 141 Prince Street, called it a gallery and mounted her first solo show in the city. “I believed in the work, and I wanted it to be seen,” she said in a recent conversation at the Jewish Museum. Her new exhibition, “Joan Semmel: In the Flesh” (on through May 31 and one of our picks for must-see exhibitions), presents 16 oil paintings across five decades that engage with nudity and sexuality on a woman’s terms. Each work is unabashed in its frankness and its proportions. The largest, Skin in the Game (2019), is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall. It’s as if Semmel always paints as far as her arm can reach.
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See all of our newslettersSemmel was born in the Bronx in 1932, and her studio is located in SoHo. In the ’60s, however, she spent seven years as an abstract expressionist in Madrid, with solo shows that traveled to Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Though Francoist Spain was more........