Feminist artist Joan Semmel explores female body, lust in new exhibition
Originally published in the Columbia Spectator, April 2, 2015 | Click to Read
This Thursday at Alexander Gray Associates, striking works about the female body, presented by feminist painter Joan Semmel, will raise provocative questions about body issues, lust, and the aging process.
"Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades" endeavors to provide a full retrospective of the artist's repertoire. Semmel uses her work to explore the female figure and show eroticism in a response to the way the media treats female sexuality and bodily autonomy. Semmel paints nude portraits of herself and other women—her self-portraiture is especially prominent in her later years. The exhibit shows five decades of her work, chronicling her changes in style through abstract art and portraits.
"That moment when she shifted that perspective to the pictorial body neck-down, it's a really important one—not only in reaffirming through the body, but it's her own body. It's the idea that she's not objectifying another body, it's her own self that's being depicted and moments of intimacy between her and her partner," Ursula Davila-Villa, senior director at Alexander Gray Associates, said.
"Those images really speak to issues of vulnerability and intimacy and an imperfect female body. At the time, what she really saw overall in the public here was an idealized female body, highly sexualized for male eyes rather than sexuality. That was claimed for a female perspective," she said.
Semmel began painting at an important time for women's rights and autonomy. Notable events, including Rosa Parks' protest and the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW), were sources of inspiration that punctuated her career. However, her work was not necessarily a response to these movements.
"I think it has to do more with issues of positioning the female body as a vehicle of agency," Davila-Villa said. "At the time, 1970s in New York, female bodies were not depicted in that way. Currently, what she is really thinking of is aging bodies complete the invisible in everyday lives. So presenting the aging bodies has to do with bringing visibility to issues that are otherwise invisible in the cultural realm."
While Semmel's work is innovative, it must be considered not as anachronistic within a larger narrative of male artistry, but rather an exemplar in a long line of feminist artwork.
"The history of female artists depicting the female body is very long and it goes beyond and before Joan," Davila-Villa said. "I think Joan has been the living voice and the pioneer in not only being part of the feminist movement of the '70s, but also in continuing to raise issues that have to do with feminist concerns that have to do with the decades she has lived across, through her work, in topics that are of her courtesy."
The painter took matters into her own hands to show that the female body does not necessarily have to be sexual.
"It's less so about spectatorship and more a broader comment on culture, and media perception in the 1970s about the female body and the aging body," Davilla-Villa said.
Joan Semmel: Across Five Decades is on view at Alexander Gray Art Gallery at 510 West 26th St. from April 2 to May 16.