Joan Semmel’s “Skin in the Game” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts—her first retrospective—evinced a sustained, fearless, and lively studio practice, which the artist has maintained for more than six decades. She joyously examines the body, and often her own. Hung chronologically, the exhibition included fifty-one paintings, all oil on canvas, as well as several works on paper. Despite the modest selection, the show covered a great portion of Semmel’s career.
The presentation began with an Abstract Expressionist painting, Perfil Infinito (Infinite Profile), 1966. Her unabashed use of color in this work, which we see throughout the exhibition, is on full display: Irregularly sized fields of bold, saturated hues—verdant green, taupe, mustard yellow, indigo, dark orange, and creamy white—fill the roughly seventy-two-by-sixty-six-inch canvas. Yet her treatment of form becomes increasingly tighter by the early 1970s in series such as “Sex Paintings,” 1971, when she turned to figuration and kinkier subject matter.
She doesn’t, however, fully drop the frenetic AbEx gesturalism until her “Second Erotic Series,” 1972–73. Based on photographs Semmel took of various heterosexual couples having sex, the extreme close-ups of genitals and cropped bodies sans heads in these images are reminiscent of straight mainstream porn. Yet their titles, such as Purple Passion, 1972, make explicit her continuing emphasis on color. In this piece, two people seemingly float before a deep-violet ground; the man’s bright-orange skin contrasts sharply against the sickly yellow flesh of the woman riding him. But the artist seems to be critiquing this scene of normative boy-on-girl intercourse: With her garish palette, Semmel transforms an ordinary fuck into a moment that is comically weird, ersatz—even grotesque.
The artist turns the camera on herself in the “Self Image” series, 1974–79. While some of the pieces from this grouping, such as Me Without Mirrors, 1974, are based on photographs, others are connected to collages made from photos as well as drawings done in pastel, oil, and crayon, a number of which, as previously mentioned, were on display. With the exception of the pink undersides of Semmel’s feet, Me Without Mirrors is largely composed of various fleshy browns. Since artist and model are one and the same in this work, subject and object are blurred. Indeed, the artist portrays her body not as a form of spectacle, but as something she humbly offers up to us.
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