On a sunny day in New York, light fills the studio of 93-year-old artist Joan Semmel, who for more than five decades has challenged the way art represents the female body.
She has lived and worked in the same SoHo apartment since 1970. Her studio, with large windows overlooking Spring Street, is filled with canvases and new works that will be exhibited in her latest series “Continuities,” between New York and Brussels.
Her body as a subject of art
Semmel is known for a practice that once shocked the art world: she uses her naked body as a model for her paintings.
However, she insists that these are not self-portraits. “It’s not me in the painting,” she says. “It’s an artistic construction, not my reality.”
In her latest works, she unabashedly presents the signs of age: sagging skin, physical changes, the aging body. For her, this is part of artistic truth, not something to hide.
A life between art and resistance
In the 70s, Semmel became a key figure in feminist art in New York, joining forces with artists who challenged gender inequalities in the art world. She moved from abstraction to figuration, creating erotic scenes that aimed to reclaim control over the representation of the female body.
“I wanted to create an erotic visual language where women had their own agency,” she says. “I didn’t want art to be limited by advertising standards or male desires.”
In 1973, when galleries refused to exhibit her, she opened her own exhibition space in SoHo — a move she describes as a "moment of rebellion."
From margin to valuation
Her work, once rejected by institutions, is now exhibited in major museums. One of her most famous works, “Mythologies and Me” (1976), places her body between images of commercialized sexuality and modern art history, as a statement against the way women have been represented.
Today, Semmel is part of retrospective exhibitions in New York and Europe, being considered a pioneer of contemporary feminist art.
Art as a way to cope with aging
In her new works, she continues to use her body as a subject, not hiding her age. “If I want to be honest, that’s what I have to show,” she says.
Although age and health have limited her physically, she still paints regularly and plans new exhibitions. “If I’m not working, I’m not happy,” she says.
In a world that often avoids aging and imperfect bodies, Joan Semmel's art remains a direct statement about freedom, identity, and self-acceptance. /GazetaExpress/
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