A COUPLE of years ago, it was "Bad Girls" at Aljira; now, it is "Designing Women" here at Rutgers, and once again there are no grounds for alarm. A Rutgers Summerfest exhibition displayed in Douglass College's Walters Hall Gallery, it was sponsored by the Mason Gross School of the Arts and organized by the printmaker Judith Brodsky, who is also a professor in the school's visual arts department.
With her ostentatiously unglamorous nudes, Joan Semmel is, in effect, attacking the shamanistic power of the media. Willem de Kooning did the same thing (if not for the same reasons) 50 years ago; Ivan Albright even earlier, with his celebrations of cellulite.
Ms. Semmel doesn't caricature her women disrobing in locker rooms, but she makes them as unlovely as possible, picking on sagging breasts and rumps, heightening the yellow tones in flesh to correspond with yellow lockers and accenting knobby knees with sludgy impasto.
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