As New York Thaws, Our Critics Have Your Essential Gallery Guide

To the left, upon entering the gallery, three paintings from the 1970s show Joan Semmel holding the sexual revolution to its word. As the women’s movement sought to level the playing field, she rotated the picture plane to deal with the horizontal space of sex and self-observation, presenting the POV of the reclining nude. Through the Object’s Eye, 1975, as it’s titled, is a radically foreshortened view of Semmel’s own body, cropped, from the collar bone down. The composition can be seen as a lush and nervy turning-of-the-tables, with something like Courbet’s Origin of the World, 1866, in mind. Ten of the 16 paintings on view are from this breakthrough early period, but the others show Semmel’s fiery rigor vis-à-vis the nude (her own unclothed body in various positions) undimmed throughout the subsequent decades… —Johanna Fateman