The canvas space is filled with bodies, and fragments of bodies. Bodies are the surface of the painting, though they push into space, foreshortened or twisted in some kind of contrapposto. That has always been the case in Joan Semmel's work. The space and the surface are the body, or bodies, which are totally engaged in their existence, their sexual and physical being. They form a psychological site. If Abstract Expressionist paintings are landscapes of the mind or psyche, Semmel's paintings incorporate abstraction. In her coupled females and males of the 1970s, one sees as far as the feet; flesh encompasses the world, and consciousness. In the locker-room paintings of the 1980s, women's bodies move in a way that defines and is defined by the environment. The symbiosis, in other words, is definitive and completely contained in moments of the artist's awareness. In a painting of Semmel's young son in the bath, shown in a 1999 exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery, the intimacy of body and place is extraordinary, erasing the distance that people seem to require. Nakedness is a given in all of these.
...
Read full article at newyorkartworld.com.
