This exhibition is the fourth in a series of shows of strong and important feminist work at the gallery this season. Ms Semmel’s exhibition was preceded by Betty Tompkins’ explicit paintings from the early 1970s, by recent paintings from Kathe Burkhart’s Liz Taylor series and by an exhibition of paintings and photowork from the late 1960s and 1970s by Eunice Golden.

Joan Semmel’s self-image paintings, done in the 1970s, are iconic feminist works. In them the artist presented her body and those of her children and lovers from her own vantage; a woman imaging herself and claiming the visual currency arising from this depiction. Done by a young woman, these paintings were both empowering and paradoxical. The intimacy of their perspective resonated with other women, giving palpable visual form to women’s experience of their own bodies and lives. Yes the paintings were problematic as well. In presenting a young, beautiful woman they could still, begrudgingly, be viewed as complicit with the passive, objectifying value structures of male-oriented representation.

In her recent paintings, done over the past two years, Semmel breaks new ground. Returning to the conceit of the self-image, she is enthrallingly explicit about both the representation of her aging body and the logistics surrounding its depiction. While her body is once again the subject, the previously unseen mechanics of its disclosure have assumed constitutional and metaphorical weight. It is the artist’s camera and mirror which structure these paintings; the camera becoming the pole around which the paintings revolve, and the mirror the inscrutable infinity of the paintings’ psychological space. Such formal bedrock imparts a bracing rigor to Semmel’s newest work, the foundation upon which beautiful color and the variegated texture of the artist’s body rest.