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Bio Summary

Joan Semmel - Artists - Alexander Gray Associates

Joan Semmel, 2022. Photo: Robert Banat 

Joan Semmel (b.1932) began her painting career in the 1960s while living in Madrid as an Abstract Expressionist, exhibiting in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in 1970, she moved to figuration in response to pornography and concerns around representation of women in the culture. 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. Her work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Tate, London, United Kingdom, the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and The Dallas Museum, TX; among many others.

Biography

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.

Joan Semmel was the subject of a 2021 career retrospective, Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game, presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2020); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany (2018); Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2016); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2016); Dallas Contemporary, TX (2016); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2014); National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2014); Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen, Germany (2013); Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2013); Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2010); Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, The Netherlands (2009); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (2007); and Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX (2006); among others. Semmel’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Tate, London, United Kingdom; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman (2008), and National Endowment for the Arts awards (1985,1980). She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University.

Public Collections

Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
Dallas Museum of Art, TX
Douglass College, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Greenville County Museum, Greenville, SC
Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
Jewish Museum, New York, NY
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum of Plastic Arts, Montevideo, Uruguay
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
New Jersey State Museum of Art, Trenton, NJ
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH
Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA
Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany
State University of New York, Albany, NY
Sweet Briar College Museum, Sweet Briar, VA
Tate, London, United Kingdom
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY