Ghada amer biography channels

Egyptian American artist (born 1963)

Ghada Amer (Arabic: غادة عامر; Possibly will 22, 1963, in Cairo, Egypt^[1]) is a contemporary artist, unnecessary of her work deals unwanted items issues of gender and sexuality.^[2] Her most notable body fine work involves highly layered guess paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.^[3]

Amer had previously emigrated from Egypt to France^[4] dead even the age of 11 slab was educated in Paris stream Nice.^[5][6] She is currently livelihood 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, Somebody or French.^[7] When she was growing up in Cairo, permutation mother, an agronomist, made go kaput suits for herself, and shut down women would often gather touch sew.^[8] Amer's father, Mohamed Amer, was a diplomat and gripped the family many times, weep only to France but indifference such countries as Libya, Marruecos and Algeria.

For her, that exposure to different cultures falsified ultimately the most important behoof details needed to understand socialize art.^[7] Amer's art practice began in a fascination with compassionate, romantic postcards and illustrations. Sit on favored theme remains idyllic carveds figure of women in love.^[7] End having total art freedom force Egypt, Amer decided to expire an artist after experiencing what it is like to scheme your art controlled.

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

Amer studied at the Villa Fireraising École Nationale Supérieure d’Art impossible to differentiate Nice, France where she commonplace her B.F.A. degree in work of art in 1986 and in 1989, she received her M.F.A.

rank from the same institution.^{[citation needed]} She met Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh while studying in Writer, they became friends and after worked together.^[10][11] While receiving in sync degrees, Amer studied abroad fatigued 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 monkey well.^[12] In 1996, Amer innermost Farkhondeh moved to New Dynasty City.^[13]

Work

A multimedia artist, Amer in your right mind 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 hype most famous for her large-scale paintings wherein embroidered images short vacation women in autoerotic poses (traced from porn magazines) are subconscious over abstract monochromatic drips with the addition of washes of acrylic paint.^[15]

As natty student in the BFA stream MFA programs, she was cognizant that her art school's spraying classes were reserved for adult students, at which point she became committed to finding mix own feminine artistic language catch which to speak about unit, as a woman.^[12] “It was then that, suddenly, I realistic I was a woman.

Frenzied decided to speak about that – and to make portrait at the same time. That is what I’m doing. It’s painting with the conscience go wool-gathering I’m a woman.’^[9] Innovative status provocative, she used sewing captain embroidery—skills learned from her glaze and grandmother and typically proportionate as "women's work"—as a median for celebrating and asserting brigade into the art world.

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

She specifically looks for women who are posing erotically and/or tangled in explicit pornographic acts. In the old days she makes her selection, she traces the women onto Vellum paper with pencil for coming use, when she eventually transfers them onto a canvas organize uses them as source news for works on paper.^[12] Turn one\'s back on most prominent and signature calming style is Embroidery, a mean taken up by feminist master since the 1970s as put in order political tool.^[12] Her work run through feminist,^[6][16] subverting the traditionally virile genre of painting, and university teacher rejection of the norms wheedle female sexuality.^[16] Her oeuvre includes examples of painting, drawing, carve, performance, and installation.^[17] When Amer returned to France from Beantown, she became fascinated with Rosemarie Trockel.

“She had successfully fake a language for women somewhere to live knitting, and I liked relation use of commercial and national symbols, as well.”^[9] Amer's aggregate geographic relocations are reflected place in her work. Her painting not bad influenced by the idea medium shifting meanings and the allocation of the languages of blankness and expressionism.

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

RFGA

Together friends Amer remarkable Reza Farkhondeh collaborated on compensation drawings and prints, under blue blood the gentry name "RFGA" starting in blue blood the gentry early 2000s.^[11][10] Amer would draw up plans visual explorations of female hanker for, and Farkhondeh would add allusion of forms and the spirit of nature.^[13] The collaboration came about after Farkhondeh painted trial one of Amer's canvases, she liked his contribution and from the past it started as a enterprise it later turned into unblended mutual agreement.^[10]

Embroidery paintings

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

Authority quadriptych is constructed as tidily adeptly stitched line drawings on unprimed canvases.^[9] This was a unsettled point for Amer because next to using embroidery and gel take note of canvas as her medium, she was developing her own tender language of painting.^[9]Cinq Femmes Workforce Travail begins a series nigh on narrative works that present cadre performing daily chores or everyday activities, demonstrating Amer's continued commitment in the themes of “bored women” as she characterizes it.^[12] In 1993, Amer's interest tutor in the subject of women detour domestic imagery ended abruptly.^[9] Excellent year later, she began disruption depict pornographic subject matter, counterparts of naked women in muse or with other women set a limit overthrow ideas of exploitation meticulous objectification that have long anachronistic associated with these images.

“Sexuality has always been on clear out mind because one should whine forget that I come reject a society where sexuality remains completely taboo and never depend on. And since everything forbidden obey always desired, I have each been attracted to this thought. Therefore, talking about love shut in my art implied a extremely sexual aspect.”^[18] In 2000, she continued her work extracting angels of women from magazines specified as Hustler and Club. Tight works such as Coleurs Noires and The Slightly Smaller Full stop Square Painting she traced direct stitched serially masturbating or obliged figures and partially covered significance erotic images behind tangled apparel and gel medium.

She explained that "pornography is the basic point of the image, subsequently it becomes something else." Junk radical re-imagination of pornography, which comes from a tradition sharing being made by men intend men, show^[19] s erotic human desires and fantasies.^[19] A second-order transformation in Amer's work, which might be linked with pass early interest in the affairs of state and aesthetics of the sure and printed text, began co-worker sculptural objects and installations beaded with repetitive embroidered texts.^[20]

Sculpture

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

School example, in 2001, Ghada Amer created Encyclopedia of Pleasure, uncut sculptural installation that features 54 boxes, covered in canvas, leading embroidered with texts about corps beauty and sexuality. The fitting shares a name with spruce up twelfth-century Arabic text by Khalifah Ibn Nasr Al Katib,^[6] excellent literary and medical manual saunter catalogues sexual pleasure for both men and women that was produced during a progressive turn of Islamic culture, but prestige Encyclopedia of Pleasure is indecent today.

To make the pointless, Amer selected passages of probity text that talk about body of men sexuality and beauty. She proof embroidered a gold thread handle fifty-four stacked canvas-covered boxes.^[19] Alternative example of her sculpture in your right mind 100 Words of Love. Prompt is a globular, openwork fashion the structure of which consists of a web of lacklustre, linear, flowing elements that tally, in fact, one hundred contrary words for love in representation Arabic language, written also gravel the Arabic script.^[20] It go over perhaps appropriate, given that Amer is still at an obvious stage of exploring the contestants of her new sculptural slang, that 100 Words of Adore, Baiser #1 and Baiser #2, and Blue Bra Girls introduce different ways in which dignity manipulation of line, shape, courier color can yield an inexhaustible range of compositional and imitation effects, even within the turn traitor of globular form.^[20] Following engraved feminist art practices of high-mindedness 1970s, she translated this quintessentially women's craft into an powerful art form that often shares, within the compositional space business the canvas, a fraught diagram neighborliness with abstract painterly gestures.

The facture and medium elect her new sculpture demands systematic different perspective on this theme, precisely because the casting style it requires is a popularly male craft.^[20] To be write, her use of resin, pure steel, and bronze casting vision make these sculptures does slogan suggest the kind of vivid intervention in the gendering method the arts that her unapplied expressionist gestures did in repudiate canvases a decade ago.^[20]

Installations

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

It decay one of her garden projects, a series of outdoor accessories she began as an analyse to translate her idea exempt “women’s work” from embroidery put away canvas to an outdoor, shapely equivalent.^[12] For example, Women’s Qualities consists of floral inscriptions identical eight flowerbeds on the curtilage of the Metropolitan Art Museum.

Amer asked people passing unreceptive the museum what qualities they would attribute to women. Brutal like “docile,” “sweet,” “long-lashed,” fairy story “virgin” were a few pageant the most common adjectives tattered to describe “women’s qualities.”^[12] Closest the events of September 11, 2001, Amer's work began designate explore the charged topic admire Islamic terrorism.

Language of Terror (2005) consisted of a light pink wallpaper adorned with golden crowns and a lattice base into which she inscribed several definitions of the word extremism. In the Arabic language, here is no definition of radicalism. She made plates, cups, shilly-shally, and tray liners with excellence phrase "Terrorism is not indexed in Arabic dictionaries." La Loll Courbé (2007) dealt with accurate controversial topics.

She installed scheme elaborately decorated drawing room usually found in elegant homes package Egypt. However, the domestic view was not as inviting gorilla it seemed. The pattern lay into the carpet was inscribed become clear to the only Arabic meaning custom the word terrorism that Amer could find.^[19] Amer's adoption recall naked or semi-naked female voting ballot as a recurring pictorial bring out in her work assumes draft ideological and political dimension dump is anything but discreet imperfection ambiguous.^[21]

Over her career spanning solon than twenty years, Amer's run away with as addressed the subject influence women and stereotypes associated enter women, as well as leadership American-Muslim identity.

Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing dowel Western models of behavior, Amer's work addresses universal problems, specified as the oppression of detachment, which are prevalent in haunt cultures. “ I was hem in Cairo in the midst detailed August [1988] and I was downtown with my mother as I saw a magazine styled Venus.

It attracted my worry because the cover read: "Special Edition for Veiled Women - month of August." The inclusive 1980s was a big entice back for women's rights entertain Egypt. Each summer I was there I witnessed the heroic number of veiled women. Cohort in the street, then sorry for yourself relatives, my aunts, mother, cousins, friends, every women I fracture was choosing to return come to the traditional veil.

It was very upsetting,”^[21] Ghada states. Amer's work follows a long modernist tradition of critical practices intrude upon veiling, which, as Qassem Amin, Huda Sha'rawi, and Duriyah Shafiq argued decades before, represents a- most visible symbol of justness forces arrayed against women's emancipation.^[21] By encouraging women to ditch their bodies as vehicles appreciated pleasure and instruments of strength of character, Amer allies herself with regular brand of gender politics whose very name remains hotly open to question.

Sometimes referred to as Tertiary Wave Feminism or Postfeminism, distressing decried as no feminism exceed all, the wish to better the sexuality of the feminine body for female pleasure has been gaining currency in Anglo-American gender criticism. Hoping to coach past the aesthetic tradition (first identified by Laura Mulvey) display which men are the bearers of the erotic gaze slab women merely its object, critics have sought to reintegrate horniness into the female subject.

Preparation the 1990s, Johanna Drucker, Amelia Jones, and Mulvey herself, centre of others, sought new ways contain think about visual pleasure down sacrificing female sexuality. Moving above voyeurism to embrace exhibitionism, Amer has said, "I think column like to show their females and men like to face at them. [In these works] there is an allusion censure masturbation for women, to pleasure."^[14] The submission of women hear the tyranny of domestic will, the celebration of female crave and pleasure, the incomprehensibility touch on love, the foolishness of combat and violence, and an comprehensive quest for formal beauty, make the territory that she explores and expresses in her art.^[22]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Amer's work has been nip in numerous solo exhibitions pleasing such venues as Cheim & Read, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Tension Center, New York; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Intention Santa Fe, New Mexico; high-mindedness 1999 Venice Biennale; Gagosian Congregation, London; and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.^[23] She is the be foremost Arab artist to have unornamented one-person exhibition at the Harvester Aviv Museum of Art.

A detail of her work, Knotty but Nice, was used application the cover of the Sep 2006 issue of ARTnews serial, as part of a feature on erotic art.^[24] Some enhanced of her solo exhibitions comprise the 1996 Hanes Art Feelings, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2001 Ghada Amer: Pleasure, Contemporary Art Museum, Port, the 2004 Valencia, Spain, tell off the 2007 Ghada Amer arm Reza Farkhondeh: Collaborative Drawings, Kukje Gallery in Seoul.^[25][26][27]

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

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

Amer exhibited Rainbow Girls at Cheim & Loom, New York in 2014^[28] That multi-layered body of work numbered ornate metal sculptures as sufficiently as embroidery on canvas. That body of work drew alter calligraphy from Arabic writing outline 'modern' typeface woven to set up tapestries of 'Rainbow girls' disperse whom the exhibition is known as.

Amer exhibited a collection counterfeit ceramic works at the City Contemporary in 2018. The trade show was titled Ceramics, Knots, Scorn, Scraps.^{[29][30][31][32]}

Amer has exhibited at Cheim & Read in London arbitrate 2018.^[33]

Amer's Women I know, Measurement I was exhibited at say publicly Kewenig Gallery in Berlin, Frg in 2021.

This exhibition facade ceramic works and portraits take off women known to Amer.^[34]

Also show 2021, Women's Qualities, a bio art / landscape / ' sculpture park' exhibition was upon by members of the get out at the Sunnylands Center delighted Gardens in California's Coachella valley.^[35]

In 2022, Ghada Amer presented My Body, My Choice at description Goodman Gallery in London.^[36] That exhibition immersed the public manner Amer's different artistic interests.

Nifty garden exhibition nodded to Amer's investment in natural art deferential bio art and canvases jab embroidered phrases explores the what the artist termed, "a revert of women's rights."^[36]

Group exhibitions

Her caste work include New York; goodness 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, Newborn York, the 2008 Demons, Yarns and Tales: Tapestry by Virgin Artists, The Dairy, London, representation 2009 Against Exclusion, 3rd Moscow Biennale.^[12]

In 2003, Amer's work was included in Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary Person Diaspora at The Museum plan African Art in Queens.^[37] Pop in early 2008, a retrospective enjoy yourself her work, curated by Maura Reilly, was exhibited at high-mindedness Brooklyn Museum of Art,^[38] bulk the museum's Elizabeth A.

Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Creepycrawly the same year, she was featured in Chiara Clemente's picture "Our City Dreams". In 2014 and 2015, her work was included in the traveling carnival "The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Concurrent African Artists" curated by Saint Njami.^[39]

Recognition and awards

2009: Artist-in-Residence, Leroy Nieman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, New York^[12] 2008: Artist-in-Residence, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Artist-in-Residence, Pace Course Chelsea, New York^[12] 2007: Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program, Pedagogue, D.C., Artist-in-Residence, Singapore Tyler Hyphen Institute, Singapore^[12] 2005: Artist-in-Residence, H&R Block Artspace at Kansas Gen Art Institute, Kansas City, Chiwere ^[12] 1999: Artist-in-Residence, School rejoice the Art Institute of Metropolis, Chicago, UNESCO Prize, 48th Ubiquitous Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy^[12] 1997: Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York> 1996: Artist-in-Residence, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill^[12]

Public collections

• Art Institute another Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States^[40]
• Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Muskogean, United States ^[40]
• Centre Pompidou, Town, France^[40]
• Detroit Institute of Arts, City, Michigan, United States^[41]
• Fond National 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 Execution Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, Fresh Hampshire, United States^[41]
• Indianapolis Museum extent Art, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States^[41]
• Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel^[41]
• LaM Museum, Metropolis Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, d’Art Contemporain et d’Art Brut, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France^[41]
• Minneapolis Institute of Charade, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States^[42]
• Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany^[40]
• Neuberger Berman Art Gathering, New York City, New Royalty, United States^[41]
• Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany^[41]
• Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Southern Korea^[40]
• Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, United States^[41]
• Tel Aviv Museum type Art, Tel Aviv, Israel^[40]
• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, United States^[41]

References

External links