Horizons, 1981

Oil on canvas
© 2022 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Ian Reeves.

In the mid-1970s, Joan Semmel turned to her own nude body as subject matter, alongside Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneemann, and other artists who had likewise adopted this strategy to subvert the male gaze. Horizons is part of a series titled Echoing Images, which, in the artist’s words, sought to “resolve the tension between abstraction and figuration.” In an exploration of the broad possibilities of representation, she repeats the same composition twice. At the bottom of the canvas, fine brushstrokes and sensitive shading depict details such as the texture of skin and minuscule hairs on the arm of the realistically depicted figure. The same nude—with knee crossed and heel held over the opposite thigh with a hand—is magnified and repeated at the top of the composition with intensely colored, gestural brushstrokes. The contours of the form, which is enlarged and closely cropped within the frame, begin to resemble the gradations of a landscape viewed from above.