Despite a month of chilling temperatures, Joan Semmel’s captivating new paintings on view in A Necessary Elaboration at Alexander Gray Associates (January 10 – February 16, 2019) bestow a welcome rush of warmth and meditative calm upon gallery-goers. In a series of works produced within the last two years, Semmel demonstrates her mastery of color and the sculptural application of paint to present her own nude image in a variety of poses. The show declares that there is still room for the simplicity of painting the human figure. Moreover, Semmel’s combination of painterly technique and recognizable content prompts viewers to engage with her work through visceral, personal associations.
Escaping the overpowering intimacy of Semmel’s paintings proves difficult from the start. Upon entry, visitors to the show are immediately greeted by a pair of horizontally oriented works, Revisiting (2016) and On My Side (2018), two reclining self-portraits depicted from the downward-gazing vantage point of the artist’s eyes. By choreographing the viewers’ “placement” within the painted scenes, Semmel turns the spectator into an occupant of the artist’s own body. Her layers of complementary hues give her bodily forms undeniable volume, thrusting them out into our plane by sharply contrasting a distant, yellow-violet leg against a fiery orange forearm.
Semmel has been perfecting her approach to depicting the female figure for nearly fifty years. After experimenting with abstraction at the beginning of her career, she turned to painting the figure in the early 1970s—specifically, anonymous figures entwined in erotic positions— offering a fresh perspective to the then-limited representation of female sexuality in art. Semmel’s eventual shift to self-portraiture has been central to her work since, and it features just as strikingly in her recent paintings as it did in her works of the early 1970s. However, while understanding the evolution of Semmel’s practice may enlighten and contextualize her newer works, it is not a prerequisite for experiencing them. Her paintings draw on what the viewer knows innately: how to perceive an amalgamation of abstracted strokes as a coherent form, and how to understand the way bodies (our own, and those of others) occupy space.
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