DORIAN RAINBOW
By:
April 24, 2026
One in a series of occasional detours from Adam McGovern’s irregularly scheduled column OFF-TOPIC.
Joan Semmel imbued the abstraction of pure paint with the “meaning” of human figures, and I tend to invest her anatomical studies with narrative.
The emblematic image for me in her new exhibition, Continuities, is Framed (2025), depicting on its literal level (an elusive zone for this layered artist and oeuvre) the painter and her mirror’s reflection. But given the many ways in which Semmel’s artistic inquiry has looped in on itself and unfurled back out into untread territory, and the way her innovations accumulate and stylistic vocabulary interchanges across cycles of work, the core “frame” within the canvas seems not a mirror, but a window through which two of her selves are encountering each other across time, the experience compounding over decades.
The figure in our foreground, and from whose vantage we ostensibly view the scene, is composed in mostly angular planes of (uncharacteristically naturalistic) color; the figure facing her (not necessarily staring “back”) is like her self-in-paint, seeming to radiate the neon colors that surrounded Semmel’s earliest body images at the start of the 1970s, inhabiting the full volumes of the figures in her paintings of realistic women in locker rooms and gyms from the 1980s, echoing the series of mirror-images she did in the early 2000s and evoking (while staying spatially distinct from) the type of overlapping/juxtaposed/stroboscopic double- and multi-figure compositions Semmel explored in the late ’70s, early ’90s, mid-2000s-2010s and today. This is the “true” self consisting of how you see things and what you aspire to present, a mirror not of the “fairest” but of fairness, where the realities of a body and one’s visions for how the self can be expressed are not reflected but projected; your dreams looking back from an abyss you filled with form and color. It’s like the reverse of Dorian Gray’s portrait, forever in the open and continually faced, conscience clear and integrity confirmed.
This exhibition is itself one of a pair, with other paintings from Semmel’s current cycle simultaneously on view at a gallery in Brussels; she is in two places at once, and for each of the component collections of self-images, as within Framed, there is more than one of her occupying the same space and point in time.
Semmel’s lifetime thematic palette is layered into this image, and other bands of that spectrum, past and only now emerging, radiate around the room. Blue Space (2025) has the simplicity of a frieze, imagery from the “temple” of the body needing little elaboration and imprintable with any viewer’s sense of identity. Shadowed Heart (2024) traces a transformation back into abstraction in its jigsaw of contiguous spaces and shapes. Some intriguing perceptual illusions are achieved in Present, where the shadow seems as corporeal as the figure casting (and sharing ambiguous space) with it; and Satin Wrap (2026), where the retinal impression of recent movement is conveyed in vivid outline over an otherwise fully modeled image, for a mythic, many-armed effect.
In Shadowed Heart and some others, having spent a career excerpting the body from different points of view, Semmel shows an exaltation of individual parts, here a hand casually drifting but occupying the compositional center and thematic core of the painting. It recalls the purposefully enlarged and perspectivally magnified hand of Michelangelo’s David, though not to convey projected power but inherent strength. This is the artist’s original tool, casting a long shadow and setting in motion what appears around it. The awareness, sensory and psychological, of every feature of our bodies is signaled and shared in this work.
That is also true of Navel Gazing (2026), though while that part of the anatomy is the painting’s galactic center, everything surrounding it arcs into a new degree of abstraction. Composed in the familiar theme of a physique folded in on itself, the painting calls to mind how many other such works of Semmel’s (including Shadowed Heart) accentuate the body’s angles as much as its curves, for an abstraction that can, curiously for the subject, seem more geometric than biomorphic. Navel Gazing, completely curvilinear, travels near the territory of Louise Bourgeois or Eva Hesse, dissolving the physical almost entirely for a strange transcendent bodyness in atmospheric pastels.
The flow of an oeuvre like Semmel’s is anticipatory as well as retrospective and immediate, and this most recent work (one of only two from the current cycle created this year, surely not long before the opening) feels like an excerpt from her next collection. The body remembers, and contains all the codes of its own future; this artist’s eyes will stay open and see it when it comes.
All artwork © 2026 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
MORE POSTS by ADAM McGOVERN: OFF-TOPIC (2019–2025 monthly) | textshow (2018 quarterly) | PANEL ZERO (comics-related Q&As, 2018 monthly) | THIS: (2016–2017 weekly) | PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HELL, a 5-part series about characters in McGovern’s and Paolo Leandri’s comic Nightworld | Two IDORU JONES comics by McGovern and Paolo Leandri | BOWIEOLOGY: Celebrating 50 years of Bowie | ODD ABSURDUM: How Felix invented the 21st century self | KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: FAWLTY TOWERS | KICK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JACKIE McGEE | NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JOAN SEMMEL | SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRO and THE LEON SUITES | FIVE-O YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JULIA | FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: KIMBA THE WHITE LION | CARBONA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: WASHINGTON BULLETS | KLAATU YOU: SILENT RUNNING | CONVOY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: QUINTET | TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: HIGHWAY PATROL | #SQUADGOALS: KAMANDI’S FAMILY | QUIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: LUCKY NUMBER | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: JIREL OF JOIRY | KERN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Data 70 | HERC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: “Freedom” | KIRK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Captain Camelot | KIRB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Full Fathom Five | A 5-part series on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos | Reviews of Annie Nocenti’s comics Katana, Catwoman, Klarion, and Green Arrow | The curated series FANCHILD | To see all of Adam’s posts, including HiLo Hero items on Lilli Carré, Judy Garland, Wally Wood, and others: CLICK HERE