Babette Semmer (b. 1989, London) is a painter based in Berlin.

Babette Semmer’s practice explores the intersections of photography, popular culture, and painting. Drawing on staged imagery from mass media — most recently the Foto-Love-Stories of BRAVO magazine — she isolates and reconfigures fragments of visual narratives that shaped collective memories of adolescence, intimacy, and desire. Through a tactile process that combines coarse sand with luminous oil paint, Semmer destabilizes the glossy immediacy of her sources, creating works that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, narrative and material presence.

Semmer studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. In 2024 she was awarded the Berlin Senate’s working grant, and in 2022 she took part in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnen Projekt. Her artist book Standing on a Given Leg was published by Nieves Verlag, Zurich, in 2024. Her work has been shown at Gao Gallery, London; Bonner Kunstverein; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Galerie Diehl, Berlin; and Studio Hanniball, Berlin. In 2026, Kunstverein Oldenburg will present her first institutional solo exhibition.