One of the highlights of the Frieze Masters Spotlight section for late-career artists deemed worthy of attention year was undoubtedly a stand of larger-than-life nude paintings by Joan Semmel (b. 1932, New York City). Instead of working from sketches, Semmel takes photographs of herself, looking down on her body, creating an extremely foreshortened figure zoomed in close, often to the point of abstraction, colourful and collaged, taken from angles known intimately only to the subject herself, overlaid and sometimes wrinkled—the body of an older woman. These self-portraits are exploratory yet knowing, showing the body as beautiful yet far from the nude. While spilling out of the frame in a similar fashion, there is none of the abjectness of Jenny Saville, none of the crudeness of Courbet, none of the raw animal fleshiness of Bacon, none of the passivity of Freud. These are women’s bodies portrayed lovingly, sexually, sensually, unflinchingly and with ownership.
“I wanted to create sexual images that were erotic for women that did not satisfy only the male appetite, which is dealt with in most pornography”
Although present on the art scene since the sixties—she forged a successful career as an abstract expressionist, working for seven years in Madrid (1963-70), before returning to the US and becoming involved in the feminist movement and art groups of seventies New York—Semmel has been moving back into the spotlight for the last five or six years. “It is too soon for me to know how much the Frieze exposure will mean,” she says when we meet a couple of months later. “But I was deeply gratified by the response of the public and collectors and curators who attended both the booth and the talks.”
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