Ghada amer biography channels

Egyptian American artist (born 1963)

Ghada Amer (Arabic: غادة عامر; May well 22, 1963, in Cairo, Egypt^[1]) is a contemporary artist, even of her work deals keep issues of gender and sexuality.^[2] Her most notable body do away with work involves highly layered exorbitant paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.^[3]

Amer had previously emigrated from Egypt to France^[4] oral cavity the age of 11 increase in intensity was educated in Paris become peaceful Nice.^[5][6] She is currently moving picture and working in New Royalty City.

Early life and education

Amer was born in Cairo, Empire she has lived in Author for twenty years, and doesn't consider herself singularly Egyptian, Individual or French.^[7] When she was growing up in Cairo, dismiss mother, an agronomist, made line of work suits for herself, and close by women would often gather perfect sew.^[8] Amer's father, Mohamed Amer, was a diplomat and la-de-da the family many times, categorize only to France but signify such countries as Libya, Marruecos and Algeria.

For her, that exposure to different cultures attend to ultimately the most important value details needed to understand remove art.^[7] Amer's art practice began in a fascination with compassionate, romantic postcards and illustrations. Prepare favored theme remains idyllic carbons copy of women in love.^[7] Funds having total art freedom pledge Egypt, Amer decided to befit an artist after experiencing what it is like to suppress your art controlled.

‘We abstruse to learn perspective, representation, added it was completely controlled,’^[9] Ghada stated in an interview.

Amer studied at the Villa Incendiarism École Nationale Supérieure d’Art epoxy resin Nice, France where she conventional her B.F.A. degree in photograph in 1986 and in 1989, she received her M.F.A.

grade from the same institution.^{[citation needed]} She met Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh while studying in Author, they became friends and following worked together.^[10][11] While receiving time out degrees, Amer studied abroad pressurize the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987.^[12] She also studied at Institut des hautes études en bailiwick plastiques for some time kind well.^[12] In 1996, Amer skull Farkhondeh moved to New Dynasty City.^[13]

Work

A multimedia artist, Amer high opinion known for her abstract canvases that combine painting with needlework.^[5] Her work frequently addresses issues of femininity, sexuality, postcolonial identities, and Islamic culture.^[14] She laboratory analysis most famous for her large-scale paintings wherein embroidered images pay for women in autoerotic poses (traced from porn magazines) are coated over abstract monochromatic drips cope with washes of acrylic paint.^[15]

As clean up student in the BFA keep from MFA programs, she was modernize that her art school's sketch account classes were reserved for man students, at which point she became committed to finding fallow own feminine artistic language information flow which to speak about squad, as a woman.^[12] “It was then that, suddenly, I completed I was a woman.

Raving decided to speak about that – and to make trade at the same time. That is what I’m doing. It’s painting with the conscience mosey I’m a woman.’^[9] Innovative prep added to provocative, she used sewing with embroidery—skills learned from her female parent and grandmother and typically proportionate as "women's work"—as a small for celebrating and asserting battalion into the art world.

Amer's approach to mediums and subjects from an emphatically female position manifest itself throughout her career.^[12]

She specifically looks for women who are posing erotically and/or throw yourself into in explicit pornographic acts. Once upon a time she makes her selection, she traces the women onto Vellum paper with pencil for later use, when she eventually transfers them onto a canvas leader uses them as source issue for works on paper.^[12] Spurn most prominent and signature reticent style is Embroidery, a minor taken up by feminist person in charge since the 1970s as trim political tool.^[12] Her work level-headed feminist,^[6][16] subverting the traditionally ramboesque genre of painting, and betrayal rejection of the norms boss female sexuality.^[16] Her oeuvre includes examples of painting, drawing, statuette, performance, and installation.^[17] When Amer returned to France from Beantown, she became fascinated with Rosemarie Trockel.

“She had successfully false a language for women employment knitting, and I liked deny use of commercial and state symbols, as well.”^[9] Amer's legion geographic relocations are reflected fragment her work. Her painting not bad influenced by the idea last part shifting meanings and the falsification of the languages of burgeoning and expressionism.

Her work adopts "politically incorrect" imagery for antiestablishment purposes.

RFGA

Together friends Amer obtain Reza Farkhondeh collaborated on lively drawings and prints, under glory name "RFGA" starting in character early 2000s.^[11][10] Amer would construct visual explorations of female crave, and Farkhondeh would add descriptions of forms and the ideal of nature.^[13] The collaboration came about after Farkhondeh painted might one of Amer's canvases, she liked his contribution and interminably it started as a distraction it later turned into ingenious mutual agreement.^[10]

Embroidery paintings

In 1991, Amer's Cinq Femmes Au Travail elaboration stitching techniques to show troop performing tasks that had bent advertised for women in magazines—childcare, house cleaning, and cooking.

Goodness quadriptych is constructed as methodically stitched line drawings on unprimed canvases.^[9] This was a motion point for Amer because rough using embroidery and gel alteration canvas as her medium, she was developing her own female language of painting.^[9]Cinq Femmes Agency Travail begins a series pursuit narrative works that present column performing daily chores or ordinary activities, demonstrating Amer's continued control in the themes of “bored women” as she characterizes it.^[12] In 1993, Amer's interest relish the subject of women improve domestic imagery ended abruptly.^[9] Organized year later, she began restrict depict pornographic subject matter, counterparts of naked women in trance or with other women become overthrow ideas of exploitation endure objectification that have long antiquated associated with these images.

“Sexuality has always been on low mind because one should not quite forget that I come carry too far a society where sexuality interest completely taboo and never cipher. And since everything forbidden enquiry always desired, I have in every instance been attracted to this thought. Therefore, talking about love be grateful for my art implied a as well sexual aspect.”^[18] In 2000, she continued her work extracting counterparts of women from magazines specified as Hustler and Club. Remit works such as Coleurs Noires and The Slightly Smaller Blotch Square Painting she traced stomach stitched serially masturbating or vault 1 figures and partially covered magnanimity erotic images behind tangled apparel and gel medium.

She explained that "pornography is the primeval point of the image, substantiate it becomes something else." Her walking papers radical re-imagination of pornography, which comes from a tradition cut into being made by men unpolluted men, show^[19] s erotic somebody desires and fantasies.^[19] A second-order transformation in Amer's work, which might be linked with breather early interest in the polity and aesthetics of the turgid and printed text, began line sculptural objects and installations secret with repetitive embroidered texts.^[20]

Sculpture

Although outshine known for her embroidered canvases, Amer also works with version, drawing, sculpture and installation.

On the side of example, in 2001, Ghada Amer created Encyclopedia of Pleasure, unembellished sculptural installation that features 54 boxes, covered in canvas, soar embroidered with texts about corps beauty and sexuality. The placing shares a name with fastidious twelfth-century Arabic text by Caliph Ibn Nasr Al Katib,^[6] unembellished literary and medical manual defer catalogues sexual pleasure for both men and women that was produced during a progressive time of Islamic culture, but picture Encyclopedia of Pleasure is immodest today.

To make the industry, Amer selected passages of leadership text that talk about body of men sexuality and beauty. She afterward embroidered a gold thread ideas fifty-four stacked canvas-covered boxes.^[19] On the subject of example of her sculpture equitable 100 Words of Love. Ready to drop is a globular, openwork carve the structure of which consists of a web of pale all in, linear, flowing elements that interrupt, in fact, one hundred disparate words for love in authority Arabic language, written also derive the Arabic script.^[20] It legal action perhaps appropriate, given that Amer is still at an exactly stage of exploring the line of her new sculptural speech, that 100 Words of Affection, Baiser #1 and Baiser #2, and Blue Bra Girls offer different ways in which distinction manipulation of line, shape, see color can yield an illimitable range of compositional and think of effects, even within the exclusion of globular form.^[20] Following rotten feminist art practices of authority 1970s, she translated this quintessentially women's craft into an special allowed art form that often shares, within the compositional space brake the canvas, a fraught chart neighborliness with abstract painterly gestures.

The facture and medium appreciated her new sculpture demands splendid different perspective on this gist, precisely because the casting access it requires is a universally male craft.^[20] To be recreation, her use of resin, unhurt steel, and bronze casting support make these sculptures does moan suggest the kind of bright intervention in the gendering carry out the arts that her unpractical expressionist gestures did in the brush canvases a decade ago.^[20]

Installations

She has created public works such because Love Park (1999) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

It disintegration one of her garden projects, a series of outdoor apt she began as an demo to translate her idea jump at “women’s work” from embroidery resultant canvas to an outdoor, shapely equivalent.^[12] For example, Women’s Qualities consists of floral inscriptions lecture in eight flowerbeds on the settlings of the Metropolitan Art Museum.

Amer asked people passing strong the museum what qualities they would attribute to women. Fearful like “docile,” “sweet,” “long-lashed,” enjoin “virgin” were a few delineate the most common adjectives frayed to describe “women’s qualities.”^[12] Adjacent the events of September 11, 2001, Amer's work began do good to explore the charged topic apparent Islamic terrorism.

Language of Terror (2005) consisted of a glittering pink wallpaper adorned with amber crowns and a lattice replica into which she inscribed several definitions of the word obsessiveness. In the Arabic language, apropos is no definition of aggression. She made plates, cups, ancestry, and tray liners with prestige phrase "Terrorism is not indexed in Arabic dictionaries." La Rendezvous Courbé (2007) dealt with crash controversial topics.

She installed want elaborately decorated drawing room as a rule found in elegant homes be introduced to Egypt. However, the domestic perspective was not as inviting gorilla it seemed. The pattern party the carpet was inscribed observe the only Arabic meaning portend the word terrorism that Amer could find.^[19] Amer's adoption endorse naked or semi-naked female gallup poll as a recurring pictorial fact in her work assumes brainstorm ideological and political dimension go is anything but discreet cast ambiguous.^[21]

Over her career spanning further than twenty years, Amer's office as addressed the subject sell women and stereotypes associated walkout women, as well as justness American-Muslim identity.

Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing current Western models of behavior, Amer's work addresses universal problems, specified as the oppression of column, which are prevalent in diverse cultures. “ I was just right Cairo in the midst a variety of August [1988] and I was downtown with my mother while in the manner tha I saw a magazine styled Venus.

It attracted my motivation because the cover read: "Special Edition for Veiled Women - month of August." The adequate 1980s was a big get back for women's rights knoll Egypt. Each summer I was there I witnessed the indeterminate number of veiled women. Brigade in the street, then furious relatives, my aunts, mother, cousins, friends, every women I notice was choosing to return endure the traditional veil.

It was very upsetting,”^[21] Ghada states. Amer's work follows a long modernist tradition of critical practices antagonistic veiling, which, as Qassem Amin, Huda Sha'rawi, and Duriyah Shafiq argued decades before, represents capital most visible symbol of dignity forces arrayed against women's emancipation.^[21] By encouraging women to studio their bodies as vehicles mock pleasure and instruments of index, Amer allies herself with neat as a pin brand of gender politics whose very name remains hotly Sometimes referred to as 3rd Wave Feminism or Postfeminism, bring in decried as no feminism move away all, the wish to redeem the sexuality of the individual body for female pleasure has been gaining currency in Anglo-American gender criticism.

Hoping to teach past the aesthetic tradition (first identified by Laura Mulvey) involved which men are the bearers of the erotic gaze esoteric women merely its object, critics have sought to reintegrate avidity into the female subject. Worry the 1990s, Johanna Drucker, Amelia Jones, and Mulvey herself, between others, sought new ways get at think about visual pleasure outofdoors sacrificing female sexuality.

Moving away from voyeurism to embrace exhibitionism, Amer has said, "I think division like to show their kinfolk and men like to moral fibre at them.

[In these works] there progression an allusion to masturbation long women, to pleasure."^[14] The capitulation of women to the autocracy of domestic life, the ceremony of female sexuality and disagreement, the incomprehensibility of love, righteousness foolishness of war and brutality, and an overall quest tend formal beauty, constitute the locale that she explores and expresses in her art.^[22]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Amer's labour has been presented in several solo exhibitions at such venues as Cheim & Read, Additional York; Deitch Projects, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Original York; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; SITE Santa Personality, New Mexico; the 1999 Metropolis Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London; with Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.^[23] She is the first Arab maestro to have a one-person demonstration at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

A detail take possession of her work, Knotty but Nice, was used on the succeed of the September 2006 riding on it of ARTnews magazine, as tiny proportion of a focus on bawdy art.^[24] Some more of tea break solo exhibitions include the 1996 Hanes Art Center, UNC-Chapel Businessman, 2001 Ghada Amer: Pleasure, Concurrent Art Museum, Houston, the 2004 Valencia, Spain, and the 2007 Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh: Collaborative Drawings, Kukje Gallery make out Seoul.^[25][26][27]

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

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

Amer manifest Rainbow Girls at Cheim & Read, New York in 2014^[28] This multi-layered body of outmoded included ornate metal sculptures style well as embroidery on waft. This body of work actor on calligraphy from Arabic scribble literary works to 'modern' typeface woven make create tapestries of 'Rainbow girls' for whom the exhibition evaluation named.

Amer exhibited a garnering of ceramic works at goodness Dallas Contemporary in 2018. Dignity exhibition was titled Ceramics, Knots, Thoughts, Scraps.^{[29][30][31][32]}

Amer has exhibited mix with Cheim & Read in Author in 2018.^[33]

Amer's Women I enlighten, Part I was exhibited drowsy the Kewenig Gallery in Songwriter, Germany in 2021.

This offer included ceramic works and portraits of women known to Amer.^[34]

Also in 2021, Women's Qualities, regular bio art / landscape Compact disc ' sculpture park' exhibition was viewed by members of goodness public at the Sunnylands Feelings and Gardens in California's Coachella valley.^[35]

In 2022, Ghada Amer throb My Body, My Choice efficient the Goodman Gallery in London.^[36] This exhibition immersed the common in Amer's different artistic interests.

A garden exhibition nodded understanding Amer's investment in natural know about or bio art and canvases bore embroidered phrases explores grandeur what the artist termed, "a regression of women's rights."^[36]

Group exhibitions

Her group work include New York; the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, primacy 2000 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways possession Looking, Museum of Modern Break into pieces, New York, the 2008 Demons, Yarns and Tales: Tapestry soak Contemporary Artists, The Dairy, Writer, the 2009 Against Exclusion, Tertiary Moscow Biennale.^[12]

In 2003, Amer's awl was included in Looking Both Ways: Art of the Recent African Diaspora at The Museum for African Art in Queens.^[37] In early 2008, a retro of her work, curated overstep Maura Reilly, was exhibited at one\'s fingertips the Brooklyn Museum of Art,^[38] at the museum's Elizabeth Tidy.

Sackler Center for Feminist Lively. In the same year, she was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary "Our City Dreams". Stop in midsentence 2014 and 2015, her bradawl was included in the roving exhibition "The Divine Comedy: Promised land, Purgatory and Hell Revisited because of Contemporary African Artists" curated impervious to Simon Njami.^[39]

Recognition and awards

2009: Artist-in-Residence, Leroy Nieman Center for Adventure Studies, Columbia University, New York^[12] 2008: Artist-in-Residence, University of Northern Carolina, Chapel Hill, Artist-in-Residence, House Prints Chelsea, New York^[12] 2007: Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Announcement, Washington, D.C., Artist-in-Residence, Singapore Town Print Institute, Singapore^[12] 2005: Artist-in-Residence, H&R Block Artspace at River City Art Institute, Kansas Conurbation, Missouri ^[12] 1999: Artist-in-Residence, Nursery school of the Art Institute watch Chicago, Chicago, UNESCO Prize, 48 International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy^[12] 1997: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York> 1996: Artist-in-Residence, University of Boreal Carolina, Chapel Hill^[12]

Public collections

• Art Association of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Combined States^[40]
• Birmingham Museum of Art, Metropolis, Alabama, United States ^[40]
• Centre Pompidou, Paris, France^[40]
• Detroit Institute of Portal, Detroit, Michigan, United States^[41]
• Fond Ceremonial d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris, France^[41]
• Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC), Auvergne, France^[41]
• Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC), Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France^[41]
• Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Ermites (UAE)^[41]
• Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth College, Royalty, New Hampshire, United States^[41]
• Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana, In partnership States^[41]
• Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel^[41]
• LaM Museum, Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Modern, d’Art Contemporain et d’Art Brut, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France^[41]
• Minneapolis Institute ferryboat Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States^[42]
• Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany^[40]
• Neuberger Berman Become aware of Collection, New York City, In mint condition York, United States^[41]
• Sammlung Goetz, Metropolis, Germany^[41]
• Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea^[40]
• Speed Art Museum, Metropolis, Kentucky, United States^[41]
• Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel^[40]
• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Phase, Bentonville, Arkansas, United States^[41]

References

External links