Joan Semmel: A Necessary Elaboration, Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West Twenty-Sixth Street, New York City, through February 16, 2019
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Always a rapturous colorist, Joan Semmel paints with extra abandon in her new suite of canvases. Passages of smoldering chiaroscuro give way to dusky pastel modeling or ultra-saturated backgrounds of crimson, turquoise, and chartreuse in the nine much-larger-than-life nudes of A Necessary Elaboration. These fresh examples of her signature approach to self-portraiture are suffused with euphoric resolve and executed with cool bravado, as the New York artist, now in her eighties, handily reprises or references key moments of her radical career.
Since the 1970s, Semmel has practiced a kind of liberated figuration, short-circuiting the male gaze by recasting the female nude as a self-observed subject, making clear the model is the artist herself. A favorite strategy: rendering her own foreshortened figure as she sees it, head and neck absent from the picture, breasts and torso and thighs like hills receding into the horizon. Two fiery yellow-orange-violet works from last year, which flank the gallery’s ground-floor stairway in a sunny welcome, fit this description. Another iconic leitmotif of Semmel’s is the inclusion of her camera or a mirror frame in the painting, tipping off the viewer to her autonomous process. Semmel, who always works from her own photographs, does not hold a viewfinder to her eye in these new images, but her dynamic compositions—which recall both in-camera cropping and the occluded views of direct or mirrored self-regard—still hint at her longstanding modus operandi. Those of us familiar with her legendary conceit are also attuned to its ever-evolving significance as her subject, her body, changes over time.
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