Joan Semmel - Continuities

‘Continuities’ appears in conjunction with an exhibition of recent paintings by American artist Joan Semmel. Conceived with the artist as a single presentation in both Brussels and New York, the exhibition’s structure mirrors the paintings’ own logic, playing with doubling and immediacy – and extending the paintings’ insistence on multiplicity and presence – to expand the act of seeing across continents. Semmel paints her own body as an authored image – internalised rather than observed. In her nineties, that act carries weight. While the ageing female form is routinely edited from view in popular culture, these canvases place it squarely at the centre, without apology or disguise.