Lorraine Shemesh is an American artist whose practice focuses on painting, drawing, and ceramics.Goodman, Jonathan. "Lorraine Shemesh at Allan Stone," Art in America, December 2000, p. 122.Little, Carl. "Lorraine Shemesh at Allan Stone." Art in America, September 1988, p. 189.Bascove, A. "Lorraine Shemesh – Inside Out," Art Fuse Magazine, May 9, 2016. Since the early 1990s, she has created investigations of the human form that balance contemporary realism with an abstract expressionist concern for gesture, rhythm and pattern.Johnson, Ken. "Lorraine Shemesh at Allan Stone," The New York Times, May 26, 2000, p. 34. Retrieved August 12, 2022.McCarthy, Gerard. "Lorraine Shemesh at Allan Stone," Art in America, November 2009, p. 197–8.Boyle, Molly. "Patterning en Pointe: Lorraine Shemesh's Interstitial Paintings and Vessels," NAD Now, July 17, 2019. Retrieved August 15, 2022. Her best-known series depict active swimmers in pools viewed from above and underwater or intertwined, costumed dancers set in ambiguous, compressed spaces.Stoppelbein, Annie. "Lorraine Shemesh: The New York Artist's Painted Pools Series Makes A Splash," Nashville Arts, August 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2022.Webster, Andrew. "You Have to See How this Artist Paints Water," Fine Art Connoisseur, May 12, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2022.Kuspit, Donald. "Lorraine Shemesh's Dancers: The Figure as Grand Abstract Gesture," Lorraine Shemesh: intersections, New York: Allan Stone Gallery, 2009, p. 7-14. Retrieved August 12, 2022. In the 2000s, her work has increasingly moved towards abstraction, with figures dissolving into faithfully rendered optical phenomena or geometric patterning.Kennedy, Patrick. "Seeing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary." Esprit, Summer 2006, p. 4–5.McCormack, Ed. "Lorraine Shemesh: The Weight of the Body Poised Against the Dance of Paint," Gallery & Studio, April/May 2009, p. 5.Nash, Steve. "Suspended: Lorraine Shemesh's Underwater States of Being," Lorraine Shemesh: Inside Out, New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2022. Describing these qualities, Art in America critic Jonathan Goodman wrote, "being true to nature enables Shemesh to record a dazzling array of painterly gestures, some of them squarely within the tradition of Abstract Expressionism ... Her use of abstract effects in the service of representation is striking and makes her art complex."
Shemesh's work has been exhibited at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,Martin, Alvin. American Realism: Twentieth Century Drawings and Watercolors from the Collection of Glenn C. Janss, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art /New York: Harry Abrams, 1986. Retrieved August 16, 2022. Bronx Museum of Art, National Academy of Design,National Academy of Design. Out of Many: Lorraine Shemesh, Events. 2021. Retrieved August 12, 2022. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), Museum of the City of New York,Karmel, Pepe. "Marginal Areas of New York City's Landscape," The New York Times, August 11, 1995, p. C20. Retrieved August 15, 2022. and Musée de Carouge (Switzerland). Her work belongs to the public collections of the National Academy Museum, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among others.National Academy Museum. Trellis, Lorraine Shemesh, Artworks. Retrieved August 15, 2022.RISD Museum. Lorraine Shemesh, Alba-Runci, Collection. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
Early life and career Shemesh was born in Jersey City, New Jersey.National Academy of Design. Lorraine Shemesh, People. Retrieved August 12, 2022.Cotner, Cara and Brendan Davis. "Lorraine Shemesh interview," Art Interview Online Magazine, April 30, 2010. As a child she studied ballet, an experience that would inform her later artwork, which explores human movement. She was classically trained in art in a multidisciplinary program at Boston University, earning a BFA in painting in 1971 and a summer fellowship at the Tanglewood Institute with painter Philip Pearlstein.Purcell, Janet. "Must See Exhibition in Princeton," The Times of Trenton, January 18, 2017. She undertook graduate studies at the Tyler School of Art (MFA, 1973) in both Philadelphia and Rome, where her inspirations included artists such as Chaïm Soutine, Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Hopper.
After graduating, Shemesh began exhibiting and taught at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Amherst College between 1973 and 1981. She appeared in group shows at ICA Boston and the DeCordova Museum and solo shows at RISD (1976) and Alpha Gallery in Boston (1978)RISD Digital Commons. Lorraine Shemesh: Paintings and Drawings, RIAD Posters. Retrieved August 15, 2022. before joining the noted Allan Stone Gallery,Shattuck, Kathryn. "In a Daughter's Film Tribute, a Celebration of a Life Lived Through Art," The New York Times, February 10, 2007. Retrieved August 15, 2022.Verel, Patrick. "Departed Collector Opens Film Celebration of Art and Artists," The New York Times, January 21, 2007. Retrieved August 15, 2022. where she had eight solo exhibitions between 1983 and 2009.Freeman, Dan, "Lorraine Shemesh at Allan Stone Gallery," Cover Arts New York, June 4, 1988.Upshaw, Regan. "Lorraine Shemesh at Allan Stone," Art in America, December 1995, p. 122. She has also had solo exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art (2006),Crow, L. "Butler Exhibit – Breaking the Surface," The Vindicator, February 23, 2006, p. D8–9. Gerald Peters Gallery (New York and Santa Fe; 2016, 2019 and 2024), and Dartmouth College (2021).Dartmouth. "Fall term '21 Artist-in-Residence: Lorraine Shemesh," News. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
Work and reception Shemesh has worked in varied figurative modes and genres throughout her career, over time moving closer to abstraction.McCormack, Ed. Water-Works New York: Allan Stone Gallery, 2000. Retrieved August 15, 2022. Her Pool and Dancer series are grounded in classical interests in human anatomy, musculature and movement. They explore the complex choreography of human connection, universal experiences of temporality and mortality, and relationships between the body and space, tension and tranquility, disjuncture and harmony.Cheng, Scarlett. "Q & A – Intersections," Lorraine Shemesh: Intersections, New York: Allan Stone Gallery, 2009. Retrieved August 12, 2022. She balances these interests against formal concerns regarding gesture, abstract form, pattern, surface and paint handling. In later work and exhibitions, she has brought paintings, drawings and ceramics into dialogue, investigating movement and pattern through common motifs and related techniques that illuminate her overall production.
Early work (1980s) Shemesh's early work included figurative drawings and pictorial quilts, Hopper-esque cityscapes and interiors, and still-life tabletop groupings of food and everyday objects, such as beach balls, flip-flop sandals, rubber gloves and women's bathing suits.Allan Stone Projects. Lorraine Shemesh. Retrieved August 12, 2022.Colford, Paul D. "Painting New York," New York Newsday, November 5, 1985, p. 11. Her still lifes consisted of graphite drawings and brightly colored oil paintings with a debt to Wayne Thiebaud that combined detailed, realist rendering with what Art in America'''s Carl Little called a sociocultural eye for excess and darker themes involving mortality, vulnerability and the "desperate sentimentality" of commonplace, non-elitist objects.Stone, Allan. Liquid States New York: Allan Stone Gallery, 2004. Retrieved August 15, 2022. Examples of this work include a grouping of candy boxes (Three Hearts) and rows of footwear whose wandering laces and multi-hued designs Little likened to a school of upward-wriggling tropical fish (Bowling Shoes).
"Painted Pools" In the early 1990s, Shemesh turned to realistic, large-scale, immersive paintings of figures viewed from under water in swimming pools, often based on in-depth anatomical studies using dancers as models.McCormack, Ed. "Dynamic Contrasts in the Art of Lorraine Shemesh," Artspeak, May 1995, p. 4. At a distance, the paintings function as classical, figurative compositions of athletic figures—displaying observational powers critics compared to George Bellows's boxers—which close up dissolve into neo-impressionist investigations of pure light or lyrical abstraction. They frequently employ anatomical foreshortening and the natural magnification caused by the changing undulation of water to energize the painting space, while exploiting the weightless quality of water to evoke bodily and out-of-body experience, transcendence of limitations, slowed time, dream and dance.Shemesh, Lorraine. "The Artist's Voice," Bulletin – National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts. Spring 2008, p. 11. Critics suggested that these expressive qualities opened the paintings to diametrically opposite interpretations, as sensually pleasurable experiences or as more disquieting dramas of disorientation, isolation, silence or danger, particularly in later works of solitary, often cropped or truncated figures whose faces are not visible.
The series initially engaged in a dialogue involving commonplace swimming-pool action above and below the water line, emphasizing the distortions of form and color on swimmers' submerged bodies (e.g., Twist and Shout and Tubes, 1993).Holmes, Stephanie. "A Talk with Dan's Papers Cover Artist Lorraine Shemesh," Dan's Papers, September 3, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2022. By the end of the decade, however, Shemesh was increasingly influenced by painters such as Jackson Pollock and loosened her control of the work, allowing the once-solid, contained figures to be fragmented into abstract optical stimuli—rippling striations, refracted details, and passages of blazing light and incandescent color that writers likened to the work of J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet.Riley, Charles, A. "Lorraine Shemesh Probes Balance of Abstraction and Figuration," Hamptons Art Hub, June 3, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2022. These paintings also adopted more geometric, circular compositional strategies, either in their figurative arrangements (Loop and Link, 1999) or by depicting inflatable tubes through which various body parts emerged (Ring, 1997).
Shemesh's 2000 show, "Water-Works," consisted of large oils and gestural studies that critics wrote, demonstrated intense, equal interest in the twisting, bending and contorting of the athletic body and the distortions of never-still water. The New York Times's Ken Johnson described the paintings as swimmers with backs arched, grasping one another's feet to form "a living yin-yang symbol" around the canvas perimeter, "immersed in luminous, painterly flux." In the later shows "Breaking the Surface" (2006) and "Inside Out" (2016), Shemesh pushed the dissolution of form further in works such as Amoeba (2005), Spots (2012) and Crescent (2013), with figures completely melting into passages of pure abstract form, pattern and brushwork.Zona, Louis A. "Introduction," Lorraine Shemesh: Breaking the Surface, Youngstown, OH: Butler Institute of American Art, 2006. Retrieved August 15, 2022.
Dancers