Alexander Gray Associates presents Continuities, an exhibition of recent paintings by Joan Semmel (b. 1932), in collaboration with Xavier Hufkens. Conceived with the artist as a single presentation across New York and Brussels, the exhibition’s structure mirrors the paintings’ own logic, playing with doubling and immediacy to extend the act of seeing across continents.
Semmel paints her own body as an authored image—internalized rather than observed. In her nineties, that act carries weight. While the aging female form is routinely edited from view, these canvases place it squarely at the center, without apology or disguise. Her compositions do not treat the body as symbol, memory, or ideal. Works such as Here I Am (2025) reject any impulse to memorialize or prettify. Saturated hues move across flesh in broad passages; contours blur and reassert themselves. In Shadowed Heart (2024), bold strokes and thin washes keep figure and ground in continual exchange as Semmel’s body emerges from and dissolves into its surroundings.
These paintings draw on strategies that have long shaped Semmel’s work—the cropping and emotive color of her 1970s canvases and the multiple figures of her Overlays (1992–1996) and Shifting Image compositions (2006–2013). In works such as Partners (2024), layering allows more than one version of the figure to remain visible, as if the body echoes across the surface. In others, color and paint handling create that sense of movement without doubling the form outright. “The earlier images are still present for me,” Semmel has said. “They’re something I can move through, not something I’m revisiting.”
In other recent paintings, Joan Semmel foregrounds color as the primary vehicle of perception, using chromatic shifts and tonal relationships to articulate the body as felt rather than described. In works such as With Glasses (2025), flesh emerges through layered hues and subtle modulations, with paint registering temperature, pressure, and movement over time. Color operates not as a surface effect, but as a means of conveying sensation and psychological presence—allowing the figure to cohere through embodied experience rather than fixed outline. By privileging chromatic intensity and painterly touch, the works resist reductive readings of the body and affirms subjectivity as fluid and contingent, reinforcing Semmel’s feminist commitment to lived, bodily experience.
Semmel’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including In the Flesh, The Jewish Museum, New York (2025); Skin in the Game, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2021), traveled to Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY (2022); and Joan Semmel: A Lucid Eye, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2013). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Sixties Surreal, Whitney Museum of American Art (2025); Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2024), traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2025), and Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2026); Capturing the Moment, Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2023); and Women Painting Women, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX (2022).
Semmel’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Jewish Museum, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman (2008), and National Endowment for the Arts awards (1985 and 1980). She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University.