Joan Semmel
b. 1932 · USA
About Joan Semmel
Joan Semmel (born 1932 in the Bronx) is an American painter whose work has examined sexuality, self-representation, and the aging body. Trained in New York as an abstract painter, she moved to Spain in 1963 and returned to New York in 1970. There she became active in feminist and anti-censorship circles and shifted toward figurative paintings that addressed erotic experience from a woman’s point of view.
From the mid-1970s Semmel increasingly used photographs of her own body as source material, cropping and foreshortening the figure from her physical vantage point. She has continued that sustained self-examination as her body has aged. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts organized her first retrospective, Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game, in 2021–22.
Available works
Information
Joan Semmel (born 1932 in the Bronx) is an American painter whose work has examined sexuality, self-representation, and the aging body. Trained in New York as an abstract painter, she moved to Spain in 1963 and returned to New York in 1970. There she became active in feminist and anti-censorship circles and shifted toward figurative paintings that addressed erotic experience from a woman’s point of view.
From the mid-1970s Semmel increasingly used photographs of her own body as source material, cropping and foreshortening the figure from her physical vantage point. She has continued that sustained self-examination as her body has aged. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts organized her first retrospective, Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game, in 2021–22.