Continuities

Xavier Hufkens Rivoli, Brussels presents Continuities, an exhibition of recent paintings by Joan Semmel (b. 1932). Conceived with the artist, the exhibition structure mirrors the paintings’ own logic, playing with doubling and immediacy to extend the act of seeing across continents. Semmel paints her own body as an authored image, internalized rather than observed. In her nineties, this act carries weight, placing the aging female form at the center without apology or disguise. Her compositions do not treat the body as symbol, memory, or ideal, with works such as Here I Am (2025) rejecting any impulse to memorialize or prettify.

Saturated hues move across flesh in broad passages, with contours blurring and reasserting themselves. In Red Breast (2025), bold strokes and thin washes keep figure and ground in continual exchange as Semmel’s body emerges from and dissolves into its surroundings. These paintings draw on strategies that have long shaped Semmel’s work, such as the cropping and emotive color of her 1970s canvases and the multiple figures of her Overlays (1992–1996) and Shifting Image compositions (2006–2013). In works such as Partners (2024) and Fleshed Out (2025), layering allows more than one version of the figure to remain visible, as if the body echoes across the surface.