‘I wanted my work to be shameless’: 93-year-old artist Joan Semel talks about her pioneering nude photographs | coloring

HeyOn a bright, sunny day in New York, light pours into the SoHo studio of 93-year-old painter Joan Simmel. She has lived in a ground-floor railroad apartment since 1970, working in a high-ceilinged room overlooking Spring Street, dominated by decades-old snake plants. A loft filled with canvases occupies one side of the carpeted room, while the other wall displays four recent paintings that will appear in her upcoming exhibition, Continuities, spread between Alexander Gray Associates locations in New York and Brussels.

Each vibrant piece evokes elements long associated with Semmel’s process—gesture, doubling, transparency, and abstraction—and features the same model she has used for more than 50 years: her nude body. She maintains that these are not self-portraits, and that she lacked heads for most of her career. Semel burst into laughter as she recalled her surprise when people asked her how she felt about “being naked out there. “I’m not, it’s a painting. It’s a building, but it’s not me,” she says.

The works in continuity were made during Semmel’s tenth decade and her depiction of sagging skin and flopping breasts is lively and unabashed. “Obviously I’m getting older,” Semel says. “If I was going to do something real, it would show.” In Here I Am (2025), the figure appears alone, sitting in a molded plastic Eames armchair exactly like the one in the Semmel dining room. She seems to be staring into the distance, present, but not quite.

Spring is semel season in New York; It is also the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum. A highlight of this show is the massive triptych Myths and I (1976), which places one of the works from her series of self-portraits between the parodies of Playboy magazine and de Kooning’s Woman. It was a response to a gallery owner who rejected the idea of ​​nudity as a political statement. “How was I different from any of these images that were presented of me of the way I was supposed to be?” She says. “I have drawn my answer.”

The exhibition showed the painting, but the museums did not touch it. Now, those same institutions are demanding contemporary pieces. “It’s weird because they always want this work that no one will offer,” Semel says. “While I’m glad it’s still a good fit for me, professionally, I wish we were somewhere else, culturally.” Simmel gets annoyed when the conversation turns toward the right’s agenda of rolling back gender equality: “If we started getting into my frustration with the political situation today in the United States, it would be a complete interview.” Although her health condition prevented her from joining the recent “No to Kings” demonstration, she was relieved that people took to the streets.

“I’m happy that there are younger women now who seem to understand that they have to fight for what they want,” she says. “It’s really important for women to understand that their lives are on the line. Seriously, we’re almost done with The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Semel grew up in the Bronx, New York, and studied drawing at Cooper Union, the Art Students League and Pratt. Semel’s marriage brought her young family to Madrid, where she spent much of the 1960s creating Abstract Expressionist paintings that were exhibited throughout Spain and South America. Simmel’s time abroad made her acutely aware of the systemic restrictions imposed on women by a patriarchal, conservative, and Catholic culture.

Divorce was illegal in Spain, so Semmel returned to New York in 1970. Now a single mother of two, Semmel soon joined New York’s SoHo artistic community, where she spent her days painting and evenings discussing issues of the day in the neighborhood at watering holes. “There was a lot of activism among women,” she says, and Semel joined artists like Anita Stickel, Judith Bernstein and Hannah Wilke in feminist agitation groups that confronted gender disparities and racism in the art world.

Simmel’s political interventions were parallel to the stylistic shift, and he embraced photography. “Everything in my life had changed, so the change was natural,” she explains. Simmel began making large-scale oil scenes of heterosexual couples having sex, their naked bodies rendered using expressive brushwork and bold, non-representational colours. She aimed to create an “erotic visual language” that would liberate nudes from academia and pornography and give women a sense of sexual power. “I was trying to get to a place where one could accept oneself without having to conform to the standards given to us by advertising, media, and fashion, which basically exist to please men,” Semel says. “I wanted to create work that was irreverent.”

In 1973, galleries were not keen on showing these works, so Semmel rented her own storefront on Prince Street. “I couldn’t convince anyone to take the risk, so I did it myself. It was my FU moment,” she says with a chuckle. “It wasn’t something that was looked down upon at the time; it was an announcement that you couldn’t get a dealer. But I’ve never regretted it.”

Having initially picked up the camera to capture original images for her erotic series, by 1974, Semel had turned the lens on herself. “I didn’t want to embody another woman,” she says. “I wanted a real body, not a perfect shape.” Before the “male gaze” enters the discourse, Simmel’s hyper-realistic self-portraits are shortened and cropped, recreating the body in a landscape in which the subject appears to be observing himself.

“Portraits started before selfies,” Semel says, and she often inserts cameras and mirrors into compositions. “You look at me while I look at you,” she says. “I like to play with who’s watching and who’s watching.” For the Continuities series, an assistant took photographs of Semmel walking along a blank wall in her studio, occasionally blending light and shadow.

Recently, physical limitations have led Simmel to adjust her ambitious scale and prefer to paint while standing. But her ability to work has not diminished, and she continues to paint at least one piece a month. She’s already thinking about her next exhibition. “I don’t really get blocked, I’m very compulsive,” Semel says. “If I don’t work, I won’t be happy.”