Joan Semmel (b.1932) has centered her painting practice around issues of the body, from desire to aging, as well as those of identity and cultural imprinting. She studied at the Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Art Student’s League of New York. In the 1960s, Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America, where she experimented with abstraction. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she turned toward figurative paintings, constructing compositions in response to pornography, popular culture, and concerns around representation. Her practice traces the transformation that women’s sexuality has seen in the last century, and emphasizes the possibility for female autonomy through the body.

In the 1970s, Semmel began her exploration of female sexuality with the Sex Paintings and Erotic Series, large scale images of sexual encounters. In these works, Semmel employs expressive color and loose, gestural brush strokes to depict couples entwined in various intimate positions. Produced in a cultural landscape shaped by second-wave feminism, the two series celebrate female sexuality, heralding a feminist approach to painting and representation. Building on these paintings, in 1974, Semmel embraced a more realistic style, and began to use her own body as her subject, shifting the perspective from that of an observer to a more personal point of view. Using a camera to frame her body, she created images notable for their formal complexity. In the 1980s, Semmel built on this complexity, painting dynamic scenes that featured her camera and body doubled and refracted via mirrors.

Since the late 1980s, Semmel has meditated on the aging female physique. Recent paintings continue the artist’s exploration of self-portraiture and female identity, representing the artist’s body doubled, fragmented, and in-motion. Dissolving the space between artist and model, viewer and subject, the paintings are notable for their celebration of color and flesh. Semmel applies saturated abstract colors in a variety of styles, merging figure and ground. Approaching her own form as a site of self-expression, in these works 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.