One step into Alexander Gray gallery and you know that Joan Semmel is a fearless woman. Semmel chose to work with the nude female figure during an era dominated by male minimalists; a time when figuration was a very poor choice for artists seeking recognition. An early feminist activist, she searched for her own voice, then used it to contemporize the female form. Dislodging it from the intractable woman-as-object niche it occupied in mid-20th-century pornography and commercial advertising, she explored sexuality from a woman’s point of view. She was among the first to use photography rather than drawing as a tool, photographing couples engaged in explicit sexual acts, and photographing then painting her own body as it aged through the years. Looking as fresh as the day they were painted, the works on view can still provoke. But the excitement in this show, featuring many seldom seen paintings, has much to do with the abstraction driving Semmel’s figuration and the way she uses it to peel away the myths and stereotypes undermining the female self from youth through advanced age.
Semmel painted “Perfil Infinito”(1966) while living in Spain with her husband and young children. Spain, then under the fist of Francisco Franco, granted few if any legal rights to women, something Semmel would remember when she battled years later for women’s rights back home. Reflecting the influence of “Informalismo,” Spain’s version of Abstract Expressionism, “Perfil Infinito” holds figure/ground relationships with contrasting blocks of saturated color providing a backdrop for a procession of irregular gestural shapes, lines, and scratchy scribbles. These elements congregate at the edges of what becomes the painting’s tense dynamic center. It faces another boldly colored figure/ground work, “Untitled,” from the Sex Paintings (1971), a semi-abstract study of cropped figures, sexually engaged, its dynamic center lodged where a man’s head is buried between a woman’s outstretched legs. A bold group of untitled black outline drawings, rough and Goyaesque, briefly but intensely summarize Semmel’s consummate handling of abstraction, expressionism, and figuration, and her intuitive ability to continually reinvent these relationships.
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