Joan Semmel at Bypass and Pratt Manhattan Gallery - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

It is possible to read the evolution of Joan Semmel's work, as not absented in this pair of exhibitions, as a record of the passages of a contemporary woman's life. For the last 20 years, Semmel's ongoing subdue has been the female [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] The terms of her explorations have been dictated the couple by the evolution of the feminist debate upon the politics of representation and by dint of the artist's own changing perceptions of her material part and the bodies of her female contemporaries.

Semmel initially plant out to define a female gaze that could transform the traditionally inert and objectified female material part into a sentient female bring under rule in some of her earliest works, Semmel painted headless female bodies as they appeared to their possessors gazing down their torsos toward their feet a certain quantity of of these paintings also contain graphic images of heterosexual sex again depicting the tangled bodies as they might appear from the female participant's point of view.

As time has passed, Semmel's approach has changed. The focus upon male/female interactions has given way to the exploration of an all-female enclave, the gymnasium. on the other hand again, it is the female gaze which defines the view A series of paintings locate in a gym locker scope reveal women of a range of material part types and ages. Though they are in various stages of undres these figures are anything on the other hand titillating. Ungainly, exhibiting the sagging breasts and lumpy muscle and fat of middle age, they appear heedless of the naked, camera-wielding artist who is glimpsed in fragmented mirror reflections. Semmel's controls weigh themselves, pull on sock apply lipstick and blow-dry their hair. They appear totally absorbed in the rituals of self-maintenance which mark our distance from the hedonistic '70s

The contrast between Semmel's early and late works is not just a matter of aging bodies. There also appear to bes to be a different faculty of perception of self which accompanies the passing of the childbearing years. The early works, for all their brave rejection of the male gaze, still exhibit the narcissism of youth, with its pride in taut muscles and even skin. In the lockerroom works Semmel's women flat as they battle to contain time's damage, present the appearance resigned to the gravitational pluck of age. They seem comfortable in each other's company and appear willing to trade the excitement of passion for the pleasure self-acceptance.

This metamorphosis is greatest in quantity strongly felt in the greatest in quantity recent works, which consist of of recent origin images laid over Semmel's of advanced age paintings of young bodies coiled in sexual intercourse. While the original figures are substantial and realistically restoreed (though often painted in unnatural shades of r virid and blue), the overlays are translucent, expressionistically restoreed images of older women lifted from the locker-room paintings. They float dreamlike above the scene, at times masking and confusing an already abstracted composition. Painted above flat, colored grounds, both advanced in years and new images seem suspended outside of time. Mysterious, poignant and wryly self-reflective, these latest paintings bring Semmel replete circle.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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