Skin as landscape. Joan Semmel's Bodily Expression.

In the vast landscape of contemporary art, figures emerge who challenge convention and invite us to reflect on fundamental concepts such as identity, corporeality and perception. Yet few names rise with the same boldness and visual power as Joan Semmel, an icon of figurative art who has delved deeply into the nuances of the human experience, illuminating the complexity and beauty of the human body in all its forms. Through a career spanning six decades, Semmel has enchanted and challenged audiences with her revolutionary portrayal of nudity and sexuality.

Born in 1932 in New York City and trained as an abstract expressionist in the 1950s, Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America, then moved to New York in the 1970s, a period of fervent social and cultural change in the United States: she witnessed and participated in the emerging feminist movement, which brought to the fore the voices and perspectives of women artists, often overlooked or marginalized by mainstream art history. During these years, women’s art experienced an unprecedented phase of expansion and revolution, with deep political and social engagement in conveying messages of emancipation, cultural critique and the struggle for gender equality.

One of the main themes addressed was the representation of the female body and its politicization: through provocative and iconoclastic works, many women artists questioned gender stereotypes and challenged prevailing aesthetic conventions. Artists such as Judy Chicago and Carolee Schneemann used their art to explore female sexuality and to reclaim control over their own bodies, openly challenging patriarchy and the objectification of women. In the wake of such trends, with a solo exhibition in 1973 of a group of paintings entitled Erotic Series, Joan Semmel began exhibiting provocative and engaging works with sexually explicit images. A year later, Semmel offered the Self-Images series to the public, in which her paintings shocked and redirected the viewer’s gaze toward the female nude.

Regarding this artistic scenario, Semmel stated that “The art world of the early 1970s was hardly prepared for such an open assault on its refined sensibilities, especially from within the holy ground of painting, and even more if it was done by a woman.” (“The art world of the early 1970s was hardly prepared for such an open assault on its refined sensibilities, especially from within the holy ground of painting, and even more so if it was conducted by a woman.”).

Semmel made large-scale oil paintings of nude partners having sex, whose bodies were rendered in vivid, neo-expressionist colors such as red, purple, yellow, and an acid or bluish green that gave off an almost ghostly glow. The perspective of the works was subjective, close-up and deliberately oblique, requiring an effort of concentration on the part of the viewer to compose the limbs, buttocks, breasts and sexual organs into recognizable images of men and women.

These paintings were later followed by those documenting Semmel’s own nude body, aged over the decades. The space and surface of these works represent bodies that are fully immersed in their existence, both physical and sexual, and constitute a tangible psychological terrain. And if the creations of Abstract Expressionism are considered landscapes of the psyche, Semmel’s works fuse abstraction with nudity, transforming it into a tangible reality.

Iconic is the Mannequins series (1996-2001), of idealized versions of the female body as alter ego for the exploration of the isolation and anomie of objectification and fetishization. A reflection of how women were very often valued for their youth and beauty and discarded in later years as powerless and no longer viable.

What makes Semmel’s art so remarkably relevant is her unique perspective on the human body. While many artists depict the body as an object of desire or aesthetic perfection, Semmel focuses on its tangible reality and physicality: his works do not conceal wrinkles, imperfections or scars; on the contrary, they celebrate them as hallmarks of the human experience.

The almost pornographic yet textural graphicity that distinguishes his art could be taken for granted, but it is not. And even today, his paintings retain the ability to shock viewers. Indeed, the artist’s provocations are not aimed at mere sensationalism; rather, they emerge from her intent to counter traditional canons, both in the artistic sphere and in popular culture, that relegate women to passive roles or to the mere object of male desire.

A singular aspect of Semmel’s art lies in her interpretation of the female nude. In her most significant works, the artist paints herself or other women in suggestive poses, investigating the sphere of her own sexuality and overturning socially accepted stereotypes of beauty. This results in a new artistic frontier, as there are few representations of female nudes of mature women in the history of art, and even fewer are self-portraits. The sensuality of flesh permeates these paintings, a sensuality that is not limited to youth.

Although her work has developed in series, the common thread through the decades is a single perspective: being within the experience of femininity and appropriating it culturally. The artist often used elements such as the mirror and the camera as strategies to destabilize the point of view and to engage the viewer as a participant.

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Of her work, Semmel said that “For me, the reason for using the nude was to deal with sensuality, and also to deal with self-image in a more basic form. That’s why I wanted the nude, and also because the nude is a genre throughout art history. [...] When you look at yourself, you’re not looking at the whole body, you see it in fragments. I was interested in how you experience the body rather than an image of an ideal-so the experiential of the body. I’m painting myself and I’m eighty-four years old. That being the case, how could I deny age? The culture totally denies the aging process for women and there’s a tremendous need for validating that experience, and also the fear that people have of being old” (“For me, the reason I used the nude was to deal with sensuality and also to deal with self-image in a more basic form. That’s why I wanted the nude, and also why the nude is a genre that runs through art history. [...] When we look at ourselves, we don’t look at the whole body, we see it in fragments. I was interested in the way we experience the body rather than the image of an ideal, so the experience of the body. I am painting myself and I am eighty-four years old. That being the case, how could I deny age? Culture totally denies the aging process of women, and there is a huge need to validate that experience, as well as the fear that people have of aging.”).

To deny the reality is, for the artist, to deny the existence of vulnerability. It is an undeniable presence, an inescapable element of life, and we cannot ignore the fact that our physical strength is not what it used to be. As an older woman, experiencing rejection in multiple contexts, she seeks to face and acknowledge this truth, the multiple and inevitable aspects of growing old, a reality that requires understanding and adaptation.

Semmel’s works confront us with a question: how do we create our reality? The multiple ways in which we visualize images of ourselves and others create an alternate reality that we tend to accept as true and real, when, in fact, it is only a facsimile that disconnects us even more from real life. And in an age when the desire for eternal youth is increasingly hammered home and concepts such as superficiality, appearance and aesthetic artificiality have taken over, Semmel’s art stands as an invitation to look beyond of superficiality, of vulnerability to embrace our deepest authenticity, the true beauty that lies in the complexity of physical reality and, above all, in honest self-expression.

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