‘I wanted my work to be shameless’: 93-year-old artist Joan Semmel on her trailblazing nudes

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 Xavier Hufkens in 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.