Joan Semmel

Joan Semmel (b. 1932) is an American painter whose work has been central to feminist figuration since the 1970s. Trained in the language of postwar abstraction, she turned to the body after returning to New York in 1970, using self-portraiture and erotic imagery to question conventions of looking, sexuality, and female agency. Her mature paintings often present the nude from the artist’s own vantage point, making aging, perception, and embodiment part of the subject rather than incidental content. Semmel’s first retrospective, Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game, was organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2021. Her work is held by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Tate.