GHADA AMER

Ghada Amer (born 1963 in Cairo, Egypt) is a contemporary artist living and working in New York City. She emigrated from her birth country at age 11 and was educated in Paris and Nice.^[1] Much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality, particularly the representation of female nudes in art history as ideal objects rather than human beings with a sexuality and eroticism of their own.^[2] She is represented by Cheim & Read Gallery [4].

While she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition for her abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose entire body of work is infused with the same ideological and aesthetic concerns. Her oeuvre includes examples of painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation.

Amer's multiple geographic relocations are reflected in her work. Her painting is influenced by the idea of shifting meanings and the appropriation of the languages of abstraction and expressionism. Her prints, drawings, and sculptures question cliché roles imposed on women; her garden projects connect embroidery and gardening as specifically "feminine" activities; and her recent installations address the current tumultuous political climate. 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 all cultures. The submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her art.

Amer's work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Cheim & Read [5], New York, Deitch Projects, New York; the 2000 Whitney Biennial, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the 2000 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; SITE Sante Fe, NM; the 1999 Venice Biennale; the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London and Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.^[5] She is the first Arab artist to have a one-person exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.^[6] A detail of her work, Knotty but Nice was used on the cover of the September 2006 cover of ARTnews magazine, as part of a focus on erotic art.^[7] In 2003 Amer's work was included inLooking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora, at The Museum for African Art in Queens.^[8] In early 2008 a retrospective of her work 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".