Joan Semmel's Paintings Are Beautifully Disturbing

"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."

"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"

Sixteen paintings occupy a one‑room exhibition titled Joan Semmel: In the Flesh at the Jewish Museum, sampling series across a half‑century career. The works range from realist to surreal and abstracted treatments of contorted women, often unsettling and beautiful. Several paintings destabilize the viewer’s orientation by collapsing landscape and flesh, as in Horizon With Hands (1976), where almost featureless surfaces are punctuated by hands that reveal a top‑down vantage of a torqued torso. Purple Diagonal (1980) similarly abstracts a prone body into Escher‑like encasements. The paintings insist that women's bodies hold interest beyond eroticized norms.

Read at Hyperallergic