Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer (b. 1963) was born in Cairo, Egypt. She earned a B.F.A. in 1986 and an M.F.A. in 1989 from École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche, Villa Arson, Nice, France. In 1997 she was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and in 1999, she received the UNESCO award at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at San Francisco Art Institute; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Ind.; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.; H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri.; and Gagosian Gallery, New York. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at such venues as Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens; National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Queens Museum of Art, New York; İstanbul Modern Sanat Müzesi; and AroS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Århus, Denmark. She participated in the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, the Venice Biennale in 1999; the Kwangju Biennale, South Korea, and the Whitney Biennial, both in 2000; and the Venice Biennale in 2005. Amer’s work can be found in numerous prominent collections including the following: Art Institute of Chicago; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art. She now lives and works in New York.

The history of art was written by men, in practice and in theory. Painting has a symbolic and dominant place inside this history, and in the twentieth century it became the major expression of masculinity, especially through abstraction. For me, the choice to be mainly a painter and to use the codes of abstract painting, as they have been defined historically, is not only an artistic challenge: its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically. I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery. By hybridizing those worlds, the canvas becomes a new territory where the feminine has its own place in a field dominated by men, and from where, I hope, we won’t be removed again. I integrate this same feminine universe into my gardens. When I had to start working outdoors I needed to find some kind of translation, something I could do instead of embroidery, but something that had the same idea. So I thought, “What can a woman do outside?” Gardening was a woman’s activity just like embroidery. This is how I decided to create gardens. My work starts always as a slight critique, then I take it seriously and I try to find the beauty and poetry of these activities. I always try to connect both ideology and aesthetics in my work as a painter or a sculptor, in one way or another. I am very much interested in this specific relationship. Aesthetics alone are not enough for me and a message alone is just propaganda.