Lorraine Shemesh

Lorraine Shemesh, Crescent, oil on canvas, 75" x 48.75", 2013. Collection of the Butler Institute of American Art.

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." 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).

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 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. where she had eight solo exhibitions between 1983 and 2009. Gerald Peters Gallery (New York and Santa Fe; 2016, 2019 and 2024),

Work and reception Shemesh has worked in varied figurative modes and genres throughout her career, over time moving closer to abstraction. 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). 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.

Recognition Shemesh's work belongs to the public collections of the Butler Institute of American Art, Danforth Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, Hood Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, Museum of the City of New York, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among others. In 2004, she was elected to the National Academy of Design.