ArtForum | Alpesh Kantilal Patel on Joan Semmel
Alpesh Kantilal Patel reviewed the recent retrospective, "Joan Semmel: Skin in the Game," for ArtForum's artguide data base of special events and exhibitions.
"The most monumental piece here (and the show’s namesake), Skin in the Game, 2019, was a four-panel painting that is eight feet high and an astonishing twenty-four feet wide. In this work, Semmel depicts a multiplicity of aged bodies—all her own—in different sizes and placed at various angles, colored in an array of pinks, golds, greens, tangerines, and plums. That the figures appear to be in a perpetual state of becoming relates not only to the artist and the developments of her own life, but also to her rich protean vision as a painter. Even as she enters her ninth decade, Semmel never fails to shock, surprise, and utterly delight."
