Body & Sole, 2004
Oil on canvas
46 x 58 in (116.84 x 147.32 cm)
Private Collection
Hold, 1972
Oil on canvas
72 x 108 in (182.88 x 274.32 cm)
Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art
Green Heart, 1971
Oil on canvas
48 x 58 in (121.92 x 147.32 cm)
Collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women)
Hanging Out, 1985
Oil on canvas
68 x 72 in (172.7 x 182.9 cm)
69 3/4 x 73 3/4 x 2 1/4 in framed (177.2 x 187.3 x 5.7 cm framed)
Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago
Intimacy-Autonomy, 1974
Oil on canvas
50 x 98 in (127 x 248.92 cm)
Collection of the Brooklyn Museum
Red Hand, 2019
Oil on canvas
48 x 60 in (121.92 x 152.4 cm)
49 3/4 x 61 3/4 x 2 1/4 in framed (126.4 x 156.8 x 5.7 cm framed)
Collection of the Aïshti Foundation
Couch Diptych, 2019
Oil on canvas in 2 parts
72 x 120 in overall (182.9 x 304.8 cm overall)
72 x 60 in each (182.9 x 152.4 cm each)
73 3/4 x 122 x 2 1/4 in framed (187.3 x 309.9 x 5.7 cm framed)
Collection of the Rennie Collection
Night Light, 1978
Oil on canvas
50 x 98 in (127 x 248.92 cm)
Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Mythologies and Me, 1976
Oil and collage on canvas
60 x 148 in (152.4 x 375.92 cm)
Collection of The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, Gift of Buffie Johnson, 1978
Purple Diagonal, 1980
Oil on canvas
78 x 104 in (198.12 x 264.16 cm)
Collection of the Dallas Museum of Art
Rising, 2021
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
Collection of the Aïshti Foundation
Secret Spaces, 1976
Oil on canvas
68 x 68 in (172.72 x 172.72 cm)
Collection of the Tate Modern
Self-Made, 1980
Oil on canvas
78 x 120 in (198.12 x 304.8 cm)
Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Sunlight, 1978
Oil on canvas
72 x 96 in (182.88 x 243.84 cm)
Collection of The Jewish Museum, New York. Purchase: Fine Arts Acquisition Fund, 2010–35
Untitled, 1971
Oil on canvas
69 x 58 in (175.26 x 147.32 cm)
Private Collection
Joan Semmel, 2019. Photo: Taylor Miller
Joan Semmel (b.1932) has centered her practice around representations of the body from the female perspective. Born in the Bronx, NY, she studied at The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League of New York. Trained as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she turned toward figurative painting, constructing compositions in response to censorship, 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.
Joan Semmel (b.1932) has centered her practice around representations of the body from the female perspective. Born in the Bronx, NY, she studied at The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League of New York. Trained as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she turned toward figurative painting, constructing compositions in response to censorship, 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 exploring female sexuality with her Sex Paintings (1971) and Erotic Series (1972). In these large-scale 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. In 1974, Semmel radically shifted her practice, adopting her own body as the focus of her paintings. With this shift, she transformed her point of view from that of an observer—a viewer outside of the canvas—to that of both an observer and subject. Using a camera to frame her body, she created a series of paintings that reflect her commitment to marrying abstraction with realism. In the 1980s, Semmel built on these works, painting dynamic scenes that featured her camera and body reflected and refracted through mirrors.
Since the late 1980s, Semmel has meditated on the aging female physique. Continuing the artist’s exploration of self-portraiture and female identity, recent canvases represent the artist’s body doubled, fragmented, and in motion. Her gestural technique and palette of intensely saturated and diluted hues often blur the distinction between representation and abstraction, occupying a liminal space in which flesh is transfigured into pure pigment. Approaching her own form as a site of self-expression, 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’s work was the subject of a career retrospective, Skin in the Game, presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2021, followed by Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2022. Her work is currently on view in Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom and It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According To Hannah Gadsby at the Brooklyn Museum, NY. Semmel's work has been featured in exhibitions at The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2020); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany (2018); The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2018 and 2010); Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2016); Dallas Contemporary, TX (2016); The Museum of Modern Art, NY (2014); National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2014); Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen, Germany (2013); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2013); Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, The Netherlands (2009); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); and National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (2007); among others. Semmel’s paintings are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Chrysler Museum of Art, 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, Water Mill, NY; Tate, London, United Kingdom; and Whitney Museum of American Art, 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 and 1980). She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University.
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Brooklyn Museum, 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, SC
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
The Jewish Museum, New York, NY
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum of Plastic Arts, Montevideo, Uruguay
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
New Jersey State Museum of Art, Trenton, NJ
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 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
Harmony Hammond, Carrie Moyer, and Joan Semmel are included in a group exhibition, Making Their Mark Curated by Cecilia Alemani at the Shah Garg Foundation, New York.
Harmony Hammond and Joan Semmel are included in the group exhibition It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.
Joan Semmel is included in the group exhibition Hardcore at Sadie Coles HQ in London.
Joan Semmel included in the group exhibition Painting in New York: 1971–83 at Karma, New York.
Joan Semmel's retrospective, Joan Semmel: Skin In The Game, travels to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, following its premiere at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Joan Semmel's group exhibition Hanging / Leaning: Women Artists on Long Island, 1960s–80s will have a panel discussion led by Director and Chief Curator of Guild Hall, Christina Mossaides, at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton, NY.
Joan Semmel included in the group exhibition HANGING/LEANING: Women Artists on Long Island, 1960s-80s at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton, NY.
Joan Semmel included in the group exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX.
A survey of recent paintings for the artist’s first one-person exhibition in Mexico at Morán Morán, Mexico City.
Tour of Joan Semmel's one-person exhibition Skin in the Game at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts led by Curatorial Fellow, Juan Omar Rodriguez.
Tour of Joan Semmel's one-person exhibition Skin in the Game at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts led by Museum Coordinator Christiana Cruz-Council.
Joan Semmel's PAFA exhibition, Skin in the Game, is accompanied by a series of four evening lectures that explore issues suggested by her work, particularly "erotic art." The third lecture of the series, discusses the "ingenious ways artists emphasize, or obscure, the member in question" in relation to artists Joan Semmel, Ming-Yi Sung, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Thomas Eakins and Sylvia Sleigh.
Joan Semmel featured as a special guest on the Brooklyn Rail's "The New Social Environment" series to discuss her exhibition at the Pennyslvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Melvin Edwards, Harmony Hammond, and Joan Semmel included in Making Community: Prints from Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Brodsky Center at PAFA, and Paulson Fontaine Press at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.
