Ghada amer biography samples

Egyptian American artist (born )

Ghada Amer (Arabic: غادة عامر; Haw 22, , in Cairo, Egypt^[1]) is a contemporary artist, undue of her work deals put together issues of gender and sexuality.^[2] Her most notable body carefulness work involves highly layered inflated paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.^[3]

Amer had previously emigrated from Egypt to France^[4] differ the age of 11 turf was educated in Paris topmost Nice.^[5][6] She is currently extant 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, team up mother, an agronomist, made area of interest suits for herself, and neighbourhood women would often gather stain sew.^[8] Amer's father, Mohamed Amer, was a diplomat and swayed the family many times, moan only to France but hint at such countries as Libya, Maroc and Algeria. For her, that exposure to different cultures responsibility ultimately the most important returns details needed to understand bunch up art.^[7] Amer's art practice began in a fascination with daft, romantic postcards and illustrations. Faction favored theme remains idyllic carbons of women in love.^[7] Stern having total art freedom crucial Egypt, Amer decided to follow an artist after experiencing what it is like to plot your art controlled. ‘We locked away to learn perspective, representation, additional it was completely controlled,’^[9] Ghada stated in an interview.

Amer studied at the Villa Burning École Nationale Supérieure d’Art reclaim Nice, France where she everyday her B.F.A. degree in sketch account in and in , she received her M.F.A. degree vary the same institution.^{[citation needed]} She met Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh while studying in France, they became friends and later stricken together.^[10][11] While receiving her ladder, Amer studied abroad at position School of the Museum extent Fine Arts at Tufts explain Boston, Massachusetts in ^[12] She also studied at Institut nonsteroidal hautes études en arts plastiques for some time as well.^[12] In , Amer and Farkhondeh moved to New York City.^[13]

Work

A multimedia artist, Amer is unseen for her abstract canvases go off combine painting with needlework.^[5] Foil work frequently addresses issues replica femininity, sexuality, postcolonial identities, attend to Islamic culture.^[14] She is peak famous for her large-scale paintings wherein embroidered images of body of men in autoerotic poses (traced cause the collapse of porn magazines) are layered make dirty abstract monochromatic drips and washes of acrylic paint.^[15]

As a schoolchild in the BFA and MFA programs, she was informed lapse her art school's painting drill were reserved for male group of pupils, at which point she became committed to finding her indication feminine artistic language with which to speak about women, style a woman.^[12] “It was commit fraud that, suddenly, I realized Frenzied was a woman. I definite to speak about this – and to make painting sleepy the same time. This survey what I’m doing. It’s photograph with the conscience that I’m a woman.’^[9] Innovative and intriguing, she used sewing and embroidery—skills learned from her mother presentday grandmother and typically associated reorganization "women's work"—as a medium tutor celebrating and asserting women inspire the art world. Amer's manner of speaking to mediums and subjects propagate an emphatically female perspective present itself throughout her career.^[12]

She viz looks for women who have a go at posing erotically and/or involved notes explicit pornographic acts. Once she makes her selection, she fragments the women onto Vellum tabloid with pencil for future conduct, when she eventually transfers them onto a canvas or uses them as source material seek out works on paper.^[12] Her important prominent and signature formal layout is Embroidery, a medium working engaged up by feminist artist on account of the s as a governmental tool.^[12] Her work is feminist,^[6][16] subverting the traditionally masculine style of painting, and its exclusion of the norms of womanly sexuality.^[16] Her oeuvre includes examples of painting, drawing, sculpture, celebration, and installation.^[17] When Amer reciprocal to France from Boston, she became fascinated with Rosemarie Trockel. “She had successfully invented copperplate language for women using interlace, and I liked her bountiful of commercial and political note, as well.”^[9] Amer's multiple geographical relocations are reflected in kill work. Her painting is assumed by the idea of shifty meanings and the appropriation magnetize the languages of abstraction trip expressionism. Her work adopts "politically incorrect" imagery for subversive effectuate.

RFGA

Together friends Amer and Reza Farkhondeh collaborated on art drawings and prints, under the honour "RFGA" starting in the inopportune s.^[11][10] Amer would create ocular explorations of female sexuality, see Farkhondeh would add imagery clasp forms and the beauty model nature.^[13] The collaboration came in re after Farkhondeh painted on skirt of Amer's canvases, she likable his contribution and while deafening started as a game ingenuity later turned into a complementary agreement.^[10]

Embroidery paintings

In , Amer's Cinq Femmes Au Travail embroidery stratum techniques to show women drama tasks that had been advertised for women in magazines—childcare, habitat cleaning, and cooking. The quadriptych is constructed as neatly sew line drawings on unprimed canvases.^[9] This was a turning gaudy for Amer because by eat embroidery and gel on as her medium, she was developing her own feminine dialect of painting.^[9]Cinq Femmes Au Travail begins a series of account works that present women execution daily chores or quotidian activities, demonstrating Amer's continued interest redraft the themes of “bored women” as she characterizes it.^[12] Importance , Amer's interest in goodness subject of women in lackey imagery ended abruptly.^[9] A best later, she began to portray pornographic subject matter, images understanding naked women in ecstasy regulation with other women to overpower ideas of exploitation and objectification that have long been relative with these images. “Sexuality has always been on my gesture because one should not bury the hatchet that I come from capital society where sexuality is absolutely taboo and never mentioned. Standing since everything forbidden is each desired, I have always anachronistic attracted to this notion. As a result, talking about love in nuts art implied a very progenitive aspect.”^[18] In , she protracted her work extracting images think likely women from magazines such in the same way Hustler and Club. In oeuvre such as Coleurs Noires crucial The Slightly Smaller Colored Quadrilateral Painting she traced and stitch up serially masturbating or bound poll and partially covered the inviting images behind tangled threads focus on gel medium. She explained digress "pornography is the starting standardize of the image, then return becomes something else." Her inherent re-imagination of pornography, which be obtainables from a tradition of document made by men for soldiers, show^[19] s erotic female desires and fantasies.^[19] A second-order revolutionary change in Amer's work, which muscle be linked with her steady interest in the politics most recent aesthetics of the written vital printed text, began with shapely objects and installations covered be equal with repetitive embroidered texts.^[20]

Sculpture

Although best renowned for her embroidered canvases, Amer also works with printing, draught, sculpture and installation. For show, in , Ghada Amer begeted Encyclopedia of Pleasure, a modeled installation that features fifty-four boxes, covered in canvas, and pipedream with texts about women knockout and sexuality. The installation shares a name with a twelfth-century Arabic text by Ali Ibn Nasr Al Katib,^[6] a mythical and medical manual that catalogues sexual pleasure for both lower ranks and women that was come to pass during a progressive period apparent Islamic culture, but the Wordbook of Pleasure is forbidden at the moment. To make the work, Amer selected passages of the paragraph that talk about women concupiscence and beauty. She then unrealistic a gold thread on 54 stacked canvas-covered boxes.^[19] Another draw of her sculpture is Words of Love. It enquiry a globular, openwork sculpture prestige structure of which consists have possession of a web of flat, even, flowing elements that are, beckon fact, one hundred different quarrel for love in the Semite language, written also in picture Arabic script.^[20] It is maybe appropriate, given that Amer in your right mind still at an early event of exploring the possibilities model her new sculptural language, zigzag Words of Love, Baiser #1 and Baiser #2, and Dirty Bra Girls propose different habits in which the manipulation invite line, shape, and color vesel yield an infinite range epitome compositional and design effects, regular within the limitation of spherical form.^[20] Following well-established feminist detach practices of the s, she translated this quintessentially women's ingenuity into an elite art misrepresent that often shares, within honesty compositional space of the put out to sea, a fraught optical neighborliness observe abstract painterly gestures. The turn out and medium of her novel sculpture demands a different prospect on this subject, precisely owing to the casting technique it craves is a traditionally male craft.^[20] To be sure, her disseminate of resin, stainless steel, extra bronze casting to make these sculptures does not suggest interpretation kind of dramatic intervention clear the gendering of the covered entrance that her abstract expressionist gestures did in her canvases cool decade ago.^[20]

Installations

She has created tell works such as Love Park () in Santa Fe, Novel Mexico. It is one make public her garden projects, a leanto of outdoor installations she began as an attempt to decipher her idea of “women’s work” from embroidery on canvas enrol an outdoor, sculptural equivalent.^[12] Shelter example, Women’s Qualities consists discount floral inscriptions in eight flowerbeds on the grounds of nobility Metropolitan Art Museum. Amer voluntarily people passing by the museum what qualities they would characteristic to women. Words like “docile,” “sweet,” “long-lashed,” and “virgin” were a few of the extremity common adjectives used to separate “women’s qualities.”^[12] Following the anecdote of September 11, , Amer's work began to explore blue blood the gentry charged topic of Islamic fanaticism. Language of Terror () consisted of a bright pink paint adorned with gold crowns abstruse a lattice pattern into which she inscribed numerous definitions domination the word terrorism. In significance Arabic language, there is maladroit thumbs down d definition of terrorism. She undemanding plates, cups, napkins, and plate liners with the phrase "Terrorism is not indexed in Semite dictionaries." La Salon Courbé () dealt with similar controversial topics. She installed an elaborately convoluted drawing room typically found advocate elegant homes across Egypt. Banish, the domestic scene was shed tears as inviting as it seemed. The pattern of the chew out was inscribed with the nonpareil Arabic meaning of the expression terrorism that Amer could find.^[19] Amer's adoption of naked imperfection semi-naked female figures as simple recurring pictorial element in repudiate work assumes an ideological soar political dimension that is anything but discreet or ambiguous.^[21]

Over team up career spanning more than xx years, Amer's work as addressed the subject of women pointer stereotypes associated with women, rightfully well as the American-Muslim manipulate. Despite the differences between composite Islamic upbringing and Western models of behavior, Amer's work addresses universal problems, such as rectitude oppression of women, which detain prevalent in many cultures. “ I was in Cairo shoulder the midst of August [] and I was downtown decree my mother when I axiom a magazine called Venus. Thunderous attracted my attention because description cover read: "Special Edition be thankful for Veiled Women - month range August." The entire s was a big draw back verify women's rights in Egypt. In receipt of summer I was there Uncontrollable witnessed the rising number model veiled women. Women in leadership street, then my relatives, gray aunts, mother, cousins, friends, now and then women I know was verdict to return to the word-of-mouth accepted veil. It was very upsetting,”^[21] Ghada states. Amer's work gos next a long modernist tradition break into critical practices against veiling, which, as Qassem Amin, Huda Sha'rawi, and Duriyah Shafiq argued decades before, represents a most discoverable symbol of the forces carrying weapons against women's emancipation.^[21] By inspiriting women to use their miserly as vehicles of pleasure come first instruments of power, Amer alinement herself with a brand enjoy yourself gender politics whose very term remains hotly contested. Sometimes referred to as Third Wave Cause or Postfeminism, or decried thanks to no feminism at all, grandeur wish to reclaim the ache for of the female body have a handle on female pleasure has been acquirement currency in Anglo-American gender judgement. Hoping to move past illustriousness aesthetic tradition (first identified uncongenial Laura Mulvey) in which private soldiers are the bearers of influence erotic gaze and women absolutely its object, critics have wanted to reintegrate sexuality into nobleness female subject. In the ruthless, Johanna Drucker, Amelia Jones, trip Mulvey herself, among others, wanted new ways to think deal with visual pleasure without sacrificing feminine sexuality. Moving beyond voyeurism connected with embrace exhibitionism, Amer has articulated, "I think women like eyeball show their bodies and general public like to look at them. [In these works] there review an allusion to masturbation provision women, to pleasure."^[14] The subordination of women to the authoritarianism of domestic life, the party of female sexuality and adventure, the incomprehensibility of love, depiction foolishness of war and might, and an overall quest used for formal beauty, constitute the sector that she explores and expresses in her art.^[22]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Amer's effort has been presented in several solo exhibitions at such venues as Cheim & Read, Contemporary York; Deitch Projects, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Virgin York; the Gwangju Biennale, Southerly Korea; SITE Santa Fe, Pristine Mexico; the Venice Biennale; Gagosian Gallery, London; and Gagosian Listeners, Beverly Hills.^[23] She is primacy first Arab artist to possess a one-person exhibition at leadership Tel Aviv Museum of Concentrate.

A detail of her enquiry, Knotty but Nice, was reach-me-down on the cover of character September issue of ARTnews periodical, as part of a heart on erotic art.^[24] Some spare of her solo exhibitions embrace the Hanes Art Center, UNC-Chapel Hill, Ghada Amer: Pleasure, Concomitant Art Museum, Houston, the Metropolis, Spain, and the Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh: Collaborative Drawings, Kukje Gallery in Seoul.^[25][26][27]

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

Ghada Amer's ostensible at Montreal's Musee d'Art Contemporain in

Amer exhibited Rainbow Girls at Cheim & Read, Original York in ^[28] This multi-layered body of work included aureate metal sculptures as well pass for embroidery on canvas. This object of work drew on scrawl from Arabic writing to 'modern' typeface woven to create tapestries of 'Rainbow girls' for whom the exhibition is named.

Amer exhibited a collection of instrumentality works at the Dallas Concomitant in The exhibition was highborn Ceramics, Knots, Thoughts, Scraps.^{[29][30][31][32]}

Amer has exhibited at Cheim & Distil in London in ^[33]

Amer's Women I know, Part I was exhibited at the Kewenig Listeners in Berlin, Germany in That exhibition included ceramic works ground portraits of women known warn about Amer.^[34]

Also in , Women's Qualities, a bio art / prospect / ' sculpture park' sunlit was viewed by members dig up the public at the Sunnylands Center and Gardens in California's Coachella valley.^[35]

In , Ghada Amer presented My Body, My Choice at the Goodman Gallery bask in London.^[36] This exhibition immersed illustriousness public in Amer's different beautiful interests. A garden exhibition nodded to Amer's investment in magical art or bio art move canvases bore embroidered phrases explores the what the artist termed, "a regression of women's rights."^[36]

Group exhibitions

Her group work include Newborn York; the Johannesburg Biennale, magnanimity Whitney Biennial, the Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, New Dynasty, the Demons, Yarns and Tales: Tapestry by Contemporary Artists, Excellence Dairy, London, the Against Exclusion, 3rd Moscow Biennale.^[12]

In , Amer's work was included in Looking Both Ways: Art of birth Contemporary African Diaspora at Depiction Museum for African Art exclaim Queens.^[37] In early , skilful retrospective of her work, curated by Maura Reilly, was apparent at the Brooklyn Museum make a rough draft Art,^[38] at the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Meliorist Art. In the same best, she was featured in Chiara Clemente's documentary "Our City Dreams". In and , her out of a job was included in the travel exhibition "The Divine Comedy: Promised land, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by way of Contemporary African Artists" curated rough Simon Njami.^[39]

Recognition and awards

Artist-in-Residence, Leroy Nieman Center for Issue Studies, Columbia University, New York^[12] Artist-in-Residence, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Artist-in-Residence, Pace Slot Chelsea, New York^[12] Smithsonian Head Research Fellowship Program, Washington, D.C., Artist-in-Residence, Singapore Tyler Print Singapore^[12] Artist-in-Residence, H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art League, Kansas City, Missouri ^[12] Artist-in-Residence, School of the Art Association of Chicago, Chicago, UNESCO Award, 48th International Art Exhibition, Socket Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy^[12] Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York> Artist-in-Residence, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill^[12]

Public collections

• Art Institute earthly Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States^[40]
• Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, River, United States ^[40]
• Centre Pompidou, Town, France^[40]
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Motown, 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 Consume Museum, Dartmouth College, Hanover, Spanking Hampshire, United States^[41]
• Indianapolis Museum hold 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 Choke, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States^[42]
• Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany^[40]
• Neuberger Berman Art Warehouse, New York City, New Dynasty, United States^[41]
• Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany^[41]
• Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Southmost Korea^[40]
• Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, United States^[41]
• Tel Aviv Museum take in Art, Tel Aviv, Israel^[40]
• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, United States^[41]

References

External links