Recognition comes first: The breasts that have begun to look like hot water bottles; the mid-section that looks like unkneaded dough. Then comes relief: Thank God someone is showing, with dignity, how bodies well past their baby-making days really look.
The paintings provoke a spiritual reverence rather than the inclination to ogle.
For decades, Joan Semmel has been creating a stir with her paintings of nudes. First, she concentrated on couples having sex, but since the 80s, she has focused on her own body. Now, the 89-year-old painter has been is having her first retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game brings together sixty years of the iconic artist’s groundbreaking paintings, from her early abstract-expressionist paintings through her movement-defining feminist art and activism to the vital work that she is making of her own mature body today.
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