Lorraine Shemesh is an American artist whose practice focuses on painting, drawing, and ceramics. 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. Her best-known series depict active swimmers in pools viewed from above and underwater or intertwined, costumed dancers set in ambiguous, compressed spaces. In the 2000s, her work has increasingly moved towards abstraction, with figures dissolving into faithfully rendered optical phenomena or geometric patterning. 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, Bronx Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), Museum of the City of New York, 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.
Early life and career
Shemesh was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. 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. 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) before joining the noted Allan Stone Gallery, where she had eight solo exhibitions between 1983 and 2009. She has also had solo exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art (2006), Gerald Peters Gallery (New York and Santa Fe; 2016 and 2019), and Dartmouth College (2021).
Work and reception
Shemesh has worked in varied figurative modes and genres throughout her career, over time moving closer to abstraction. 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. 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. 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. 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).