Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer (Arabic: غادة عامر; born 1963 in Cairo, Egypt) is an Egyptian contemporary artist. Much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality. Her most well-known work involves layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies, referencing pornographic imagery.

She lives and works in New York City.

Early life and education Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt. She emigrated from Egypt to France at the age of 11 and was educated in Paris and Nice. Her mother was an agronomist who made business suits for herself. Amer's father, Mohamed Amer, was a diplomat and moved the family many times, not only to France but also to Libya, Morocco, and Algeria.

Amer studied at the Villa Arson in Nice, France where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting in 1986 and her Master of Fine Arts in 1989. She met Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh while studying in France, and they became friends and later worked together. While receiving her degrees, Amer studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1996, Amer and Farkhondeh moved to New York City.

Work A multimedia artist, Amer is known for her abstract canvases that combine painting with needlework. She is most famous for her large-scale paintings wherein embroidered images of women in autoerotic poses (traced from porn magazines) are layered over abstract monochromatic drips and washes of acrylic paint.

As a student in the BFA and MFA programs, she was informed that her art school's painting classes were reserved for male students, at which point she became committed to finding her own feminine artistic language with which to speak about women, as a woman. subverting the traditionally masculine genre of painting, and its rejection of the norms of female sexuality. When Amer returned to France from Boston, she became fascinated with Rosemarie Trockel. “She had successfully invented a language for women using knitting, and I liked her use of commercial and political symbols, as well.” In 2000, she continued her work extracting images of women from magazines such as Hustler and Club. In works such as Coleurs Noires and The Slightly Smaller Colored Square Painting she traced and stitched serially masturbating or bound figures and partially covered the erotic images behind tangled threads and gel medium. She explained that "pornography is the starting point of the image, then it becomes something else." Her radical re-imagination of pornography, which comes from a tradition of being made by men for men, show s erotic female desires and fantasies.

Sculpture Although best known for her embroidered canvases, Amer also works with printing, drawing, sculpture and installation. For example, in 2001, Ghada Amer created Encyclopedia of Pleasure, a sculptural installation that features fifty-four boxes, covered in canvas, and embroidered with texts about women beauty and sexuality. The installation shares a name with a twelfth-century Arabic text by Ali Ibn Nasr Al Katib,

Over her career spanning more than twenty years, Amer's work as addressed the subject of women and stereotypes associated with women, as well as the American-Muslim identity. Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing and Western models of behavior, Amer's work addresses universal problems, such as the oppression of women, which are prevalent in many cultures. “ I was in Cairo in the midst of August and I was downtown with my mother when I saw a magazine called Venus. It attracted my attention because the cover read: "Special Edition for Veiled Women - month of August." The entire 1980s was a big draw back for women's rights in Egypt. Each summer I was there I witnessed the rising number of veiled women. Women in the street, then my relatives, my aunts, mother, cousins, friends, every women I know was choosing to return to the traditional veil. It was very upsetting,”

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions Amer's work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions at such venues as Cheim & Read, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; the 1999 Venice Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London; and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. She is the first Arab artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

A detail of her work, Knotty but Nice, was used on the cover of the September 2006 issue of ARTnews magazine, as part of a focus on erotic art. Some more of her solo exhibitions include the 1996 Hanes Art Center, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2001 Ghada Amer: Pleasure, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, the 2004 Valencia, Spain, and the 2007 Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh: Collaborative Drawings, Kukje Gallery in Seoul.

In 2010 Amer and Farkhondeh showed The Gardens next door at Galeria in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ghada Amer's exhibited at Montreal's Musee d'Art Contemporain in 2012.

Amer exhibited Rainbow Girls at Cheim & Read, New York in 2014 This multi-layered body of work included ornate metal sculptures as well as embroidery on canvas. This body of work drew on calligraphy from Arabic writing to 'modern' typeface woven to create tapestries of 'Rainbow girls' for whom the exhibition is named.

Amer exhibited a collection of ceramic works at the Dallas Contemporary in 2018. The exhibition was titled Ceramics, Knots, Thoughts, Scraps.

Amer has exhibited at Cheim & Read in London in 2018.

Amer's Women I know, Part I was exhibited at the Kewenig Gallery in Berlin, Germany in 2021. This exhibition included ceramic works and portraits of women known to Amer.

Also in 2021, Women's Qualities, a bio art / landscape / ' sculpture park' exhibition was viewed by members of the public at the Sunnylands Center and Gardens in California's Coachella valley.

In 2022, Ghada Amer presented My Body, My Choice at the Goodman Gallery in London. This exhibition immersed the public in Amer's different artistic interests. A garden exhibition nodded to Amer's investment in natural art or bio art and canvases bore embroidered phrases explores the what the artist termed, "a regression of women's rights." In early 2008, a retrospective of her work, curated by Maura Reilly, was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, at the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. In the same year, she was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary "Our City Dreams". In 2014 and 2015, her work was included in the traveling exhibition "The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists" curated by Simon Njami. The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Marseille held a solo exhibition of Amer's work from 2 December 2022 to 16 April 2023, in the Georges Henri Rivière building at Fort Saint-Jean.

Recognition and awards 2009: Artist-in-Residence, Leroy Nieman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, New York Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama, United States Fond National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris, France Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany