The background of a self-portrait can sometimes be more telling than the image of the artist contained within. That much is at least true of Joan Semmel’s Statuesque (2025), in which the nude artist places one leg on a stool and leans her weight across it. Semmel nearly fills the canvas with her body, rendered in drippy, thinned-down oil paint that threatens to cross the blue outline separating her purplish torso from the yellow field adjacent to it. That her washy paint leaks from the figure into its surroundings is no accident.
Nude bodies have been Semmel’s focus for decades—her excellent ones from the ’70s are included in a mini-survey at the Jewish Museum uptown—and though she has been painting herself for much of that time, she is currently the lone subject of her oeuvre. Now in her 90s, Semmel appears in every one of her new paintings, leaving little to the imagination in the process. She continues to paint herself with a brilliant matter-of-factness, seemingly in defiance of the fact that aging female bodies are still rarely depicted in artworks shown in commercial spaces. One 2025 painting of herself in a white chair, her legs slightly spread apart, is even titled Here I Am.
Yet however direct works such as that one may be, Semmel also applies her semitranslucent strokes in multiple hues, making it so that her figures feel spectral, as though they were coming apart in real time. It’s an effect most notable in the works in this remarkable show where she represents herself two times over. One of them, titled Partners (2024), features the artist in repose, pushing herself up with one arm, with another version of herself stationed nearby. The lying figure is partially see-through, providing a clear view of the second Semmel’s face. It looks a bit like a soul leaving its body.
Through May 30, at 394 Broadway.
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