Saturday, January 10, 2026 at 5:00 PM to Saturday, February 21, 2026 at 6:00 PM
Official Welcome, Los Angeles
December 18, 2025 – Official Welcome is proud to announce Body Shop, a solo exhibition of new works by Beverly Semmes (b. Washington D.C.) opening at the gallery on Saturday, January 10, 2026. For several decades now, Semmes has made bodies of work that plumb conditions, affects, impressions, critical positions, aesthetics, and many other details related to the female body. Her large-scale soft sculptures, most often in the form of impossible garments (sleeves 10’ long, shoulders 4’ wide, conjoined in a series of six at the shoulder) have become iconic touchstones in museum collections around the country, seductively, softly, insistently taking over entire walls and galleries, leisurely extending themselves to fill all available space. In parallel, she has developed a painting practice pragmatically, and perhaps also ironically, titled the Feminist Responsibility Project. In the FRP Semmes works through an archive of pornographic images, the likes of which used to be purchased from behind or underneath the counters of bodegas, gas stations, and liquor stores, printing them on canvas and editing them with ink, paint, glitter, and other materials until the images have been “corrected” with some level of feminist sensibility, perhaps until they appeal to a female gaze, or an aesthetics of desire and pleasure more discrete and erotic than the straightforward efficiency of pornography. Semmes’ work is not opposed to pleasure, but seems to perhaps advocate for a more intimate seduction than what is on offer when explicit images of one’s fantasies can be purchased alongside a pack of cigarettes, rolls of toilet paper, and cold beer. So, now we’re starting to get somewhere with Semmes’ new work in which her soft sculptures, ready-made consumer objects, in this case primarily slippers and house shoes, and the FRP have become enmeshed into beguiling objects that are not exactly any of the above nor a clear sum of their parts. Body Shop includes several new works that combine large, but not giant, soft bodices in faux fur, velvet, and other materials with pairs of slippers ranging from a pair of Versace driving moccasins and Gucci fur lined horsebit scuffs to Ugg brand and generic fuzzy slippers. Some of these also include a small canvas in the FRP series. Assembled on the wall, the bodice faces the viewer at about eye level. The slippers would be standing on the breasts of the implied figures, if the works were on the floor, the implied figure lying down, and such a stance therefore probable or possible. Mounted on the wall, the slippers slip in their possible meaning – they protrude from the flat surface, like breasts. They’re consumer objects of varying size, shape, and quality, like so many augmented body parts. This isn’t the first time that Semmes has incorporated ready made items into her work, notably, her 2022 sculpture, Marigold, which ensconced an Alexander McQueen gown in her own violet bathrobe and transformed a McQueen clutch with paint in much the same way she continues to transform pornography for the FRP. There is something to this equitable treatment of porno and luxury items, both objects of consumer desire. These works reflect something of Nick Carraway’s simultaneous enchantment and repulsion with the world of Jay Gatsby, which is emphatically not a description of ambivalence, but of both strong feelings being simultaneous – neither winning out. These slippers, these images, these textures compel the desire to touch, to own, to experience – and at the same time the experience that a purchase or a wank renders can feel a bit less than what was imagined before the desire is satisfied. As artworks, this slippage between the imaginary of pleasure before the object of desire is consumed, and the actual experience of consumption is transformed into a sort of infinity loop of not quite one or the other. Semmes’ semiotic humor is a bit of Pete and Repeat joke, keeping the viewer in this space of almost satisfied, always maintaining that little bit of desire. About the Artist Beverly Semmes is an interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates sculpture, painting, drawing, film, photography, performance, and fashion. Semmes received her MFA in Sculpture in 1987 from the Yale School of Art. She also studied at the New York Studio School, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she has served on the Board of Governors since 2000. Based in New York City since 1982, Semmes has had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the ICA Philadelphia, the MCA Chicago, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Ginza Art Space, among others. In 2025 the Tufts University Art Galleries presented a five-decade survey of Semmes’ practice curated by Dina Deitsch. This retrospective, Boulders / Flag / Kick / Flip, coincided with a solo presentation at MOCA Cleveland in June 2025. Semmes’ work is included in the following group exhibitions: Everyday Revolutions at the Brooklyn Museum, Fictions of Display at MOCA LA, Fabricated Imaginaries: Crafting Art at the Rose Art Museum, and Contemporary Glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. Recently, the artist was included in Tea Party at Locks Gallery, Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years at Grey Art Museum, Generations: 150 Years Of Sculpture at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Wonderland: Curious Nature at the New York Botanical Gardens, as well as Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum, and the 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum. Semmes’s works are included in numerous permanent collections, including the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Walker Art Center, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Museum Arnhem, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.