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On a life-revivingly sunny day in New York, light pours into the SoHo studio of the 93-year-old painter Joan Semmel. She’s lived in the floor-through railroad apartment since 1970, and she works out of a high-ceilinged room overlooking Spring Street, dominated by a decades-old snake plant. A loft stuffed with canvases occupies one side of the carpeted room, while the other wall displays four recent paintings that will appear in her upcoming show, Continuities, spread between locations of Alexander Gray Associates in New York and Brussels.
Each vibrant piece evokes elements that have long connected Semmel’s process – gesture, doubling, transparency and abstraction – and features the same model she’s used for more than 50 years: her own nude body. She has maintained that these are not self-portraits, and for much of her career they lacked heads. Semmel bursts into laughter while recalling her surprise when people asked how she felt about “being naked out there. I’m not, that’s a painting,” she says. “It’s a construct, but it’s not me.”
The works in Continuities were made during Semmel’s 10th decade and her depiction of sagging skin and flopping breasts is exuberant and unabashed. “Obviously, I age,” Semmel says. “If I’m going to do something authentic, it’s going to show that.” In Here I Am (2025), the figure appears alone, seated in a molded-plastic Eames armchair just like the ones in Semmel’s dining room. She appears to gaze into the distance, present, but not quite.
Spring is Semmel season in New York; she’s also the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum. A standout in that show is the monumental triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), which places one of the works from her Self Image series between parodies of a Playboy centerfold and De Kooning’s Woman. It was a response to a gallerist who balked at the idea that a nude could be considered a political statement. “How was I different from either one of these images that are given to me as a way I’m supposed to be?” she says. “I painted my answer.”
The gallery showed the painting, but the museums wouldn’t touch it. Now, those same institutions are clamoring for contemporaneous pieces. “It’s strange because they always want that work that nobody would show,” Semmel says. “While I’m glad that it’s still relevant for me, professionally, I had hoped that we’d be in some other place, culturally.” Semmel bristles when the conversation turns towards the right’s agenda to roll back gender equality: “If we start getting into my frustration with the political situation today in the States, it will be a whole interview.” Though her health prevented her from joining a recent No Kings demonstration, she was heartened that people were taking to the streets.
“I’m happy that there are younger women now who seem to understand that they have to fight for what they want,” she says. “It’s really important for women to understand that their lives are at stake. Seriously, we’re almost at The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Semmel grew up in the Bronx, New York, and studied painting at Cooper Union, the Art Students League and Pratt. Semmel’s marriage brought her young family to Madrid, where she spent most of the 1960s making abstract expressionist paintings that were exhibited around Spain and South America. Semmel’s time overseas made her acutely aware of the systemic restrictions imposed upon women by a patriarchal, conservative and Catholic culture.
Divorce was illegal in Spain, so Semmel returned to New York in 1970. Now a single mother of two, Semmel quickly fell in with New York’s SoHo art community, spending her days painting and evenings debating the issues of the day at the neighborhood watering holes. “There was a great deal of activity amongst the women,” she says, and Semmel joined artists such as Anita Steckel, Judith Bernstein and Hannah Wilke in feminist agitation groups that confronted gender and racial disparities in the art world.
Semmel’s political involvements ran parallel with a stylistic shift, and she embraced figuration. “Everything in my life had shifted around, so it was a natural change,” she explains. Semmel began making large-scale oil scenes of heterosexual couples having sex, their naked bodies rendered with expressive brushwork and bold, nonrepresentational colors. She aimed to create an “erotic visual language” that liberated the nude from academia and pornography and gave women a sense of sexual agency. “I was trying to get to a place where one could accept oneself without needing to conform to standards given to us from advertising, media and fashion, which essentially exist to please men,” Semmel says. “I wanted to create work that would be shameless.”
In 1973, galleries weren’t chomping at the bit to show these works, so Semmel rented her own storefront on Prince Street. “I wasn’t able to get anyone to take the risk, so I did it myself. It was my FU moment,” she says with a chuckle. “It was not a thing that was looked upon with favor at the time; it was an announcement that you couldn’t get a dealer. But I never regretted it.”
After initially picking up a camera to take source images for her Erotic series, by 1974 Semmel turned the lens on herself. “I didn’t want to objectify another woman,” she says. “I wanted a real body, not an idealized form.” Before the “male gaze” entered the discourse, Semmel’s highly realistic Self Images were foreshortened and cropped, recasting flesh into landscape as the subject appeared to observe herself.
“The Self Images started way back before selfies,” Semmel says, and she has often inserted cameras and mirrors into compositions. “You’re looking at me while I’m looking at you,” she says. “I like to play with who is viewed and who is the viewer.” For the Continuities series, an assistant snapped photos of Semmel as she walked along the empty wall of her studio, occasionally incorporating light and shadow.
Recently, physical limitations have led Semmel to adjust her ambitious scale and preference to paint while standing. But her capacity to work is undiminished, and she continues to paint at least one piece a month. She’s already thinking about her next exhibition. “I don’t really get blocked, I’m too compulsive,” Semmel says. “If I don’t work, I’m not happy.”
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