Joan Semmel’s paintings of contorted women — sometimes realist, sometimes surreal or abstracted — are mesmerizing and beautiful, but they are also disturbing. When her work is framed as such, the focus is typically shifted to the viewer: It unsettles because we’re used to media depictions of young, taut bodies, or it forces us to confront our own relationship with beauty standards and aging. I think that flattens her work. These paintings are far weirder than they get credit for.
The 16 paintings in the one-room exhibition Joan Semmel: In the Flesh at the Jewish Museum constitute a sampling of various series from her half-century career, with a section in the center dedicated to works the artist selected from the museum’s collection. Toward the middle of the chronological review is “Horizon With Hands” (1976) — even its title is disquieting, suggesting a fusion of landscape and flesh. The bulk of the square painting is almost featureless; we could be looking at an expanse of stone or a rippling dune. It is the hands along the top edge that orient us: Follow an arm around the right side, and it clicks that we are the vantage point, looking down on our torso, a slab of torqued flesh — it takes a beat longer than is normal, or comfortable, to recognize a depiction of the body. Upon that realization, I felt a sense of dreamy, claustrophobic paralysis: Who am I, how did I find myself here? I wanted so badly to see a finger twitch, to feel in control of myself again within this alien form.
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