Ghada Amer

Biography

At the Villa Arson art school in Nice, where Ghada Amer studied in the eighties, she was told that the painting classes were meant for male students. It was then, by her own account, that she first became aware of herself as a woman, and decided to speak about this by means of painting.

The instrument turned out to be a sewing needle.

She was born in 1963 in Cairo; when she was eleven the family moved to France, and what followed was schooling in Paris and Nice. At the Villa Arson she took a bachelor's degree in painting in 1986 and a master's in 1989; in 1987 she spent a year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and later studied at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. Back from Boston, she became absorbed in Rosemarie Trockel, who, as it seemed to her, had found a language of women's own in knitting. Sewing and embroidery Amer knew from her mother and grandmother. In France she became friends with the Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh; in 1996 the two of them moved to New York.

The first work from which she dates her career is “Five Women at Work” (Cinq femmes au travail, 1991): four unprimed canvases on which women are stitched in neat lines, busy with what the magazines recommended to women, cleaning, cooking, children; the figures look like pictures from an old textbook, outlined and empty inside. In 1993 text entered the canvases: the entry for “love” from the Petit Robert dictionary, advice on personal grooming under the title “Beauty Tips”. The text is run through on a sewing machine, the thread keeps changing colour, loose ends hang from individual words and tangle, and part of the sentence becomes unreadable. In 1995 came “Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie”: two stitched jumpsuits, one “female”, one “male”, covered all over with the embroidered phrase of the title, and nobody inside. And from the mid-1990s she began tracing onto vellum, and then onto canvas, women from magazines such as Hustler and Club, in explicit poses, repeating a single figure across the whole canvas like a pattern in embroidery until the image dissolves; before the embroidery, abstract blots and drips of paint go onto the canvas, the very gesture that the Abstract Expressionists had made legitimate. “Pornography is the starting point of the image, then it becomes something else,” she says. To my mind the main thing in these canvases is distance: from afar it is Abstract Expressionism, close up it is embroidery.

Out of embroidery grew three-dimensional works and gardens. “Encyclopedia of Pleasure” (2001) is fifty-four canvas-covered boxes on which passages from the twelfth-century Arabic treatise of the same name by Ali ibn Nasr al-Katib, on women's beauty and desire, are embroidered in gold thread. “Love Park” (1999) in Santa Fe opened a series of garden projects, a transfer of “women's work” from canvas into landscape; in “Women's Qualities” the flowerbeds spell out in flowers the epithets that passers-by attributed to women: “docile”, “sweet”, “long-lashed”. After 11 September 2001 she took up the word “terrorism”: in Arabic dictionaries, by her observation, it has no definition, and in “Language of Terror” (2005) bright pink wallpaper with gold crowns is covered with its definitions from other languages; in “Le Salon Courbé” (2007) an ornate Egyptian drawing room is recreated, with the single Arabic gloss she had managed to find worked into the pattern of the carpet. The sculpture “100 Words of Love” is an openwork sphere woven from a hundred Arabic words meaning love; for such pieces she took up casting in resin, steel and bronze.

Since the early 2000s Amer and Reza Farkhondeh have signed joint drawings and prints with the abbreviation RFGA: she embroiders the women, he adds plants and natural forms. It began when he once went over one of her canvases with paint, and she liked it.

Solo exhibitions followed at Cheim & Read and Deitch Projects in New York, at P.S.1, at the Gagosian Gallery in London and in Beverly Hills; she took part in the Venice Biennale of 1999, where she received the UNESCO Prize, in the Whitney and Gwangju biennials of 2000, and in 1997 she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. In 2008 the Brooklyn Museum showed her retrospective, “Love Has No End”, at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, curated by Maura Reilly. Then came “Rainbow Girls” at Cheim & Read (2014), with metal sculptures and embroidery based on Arabic calligraphy, ceramics at Dallas Contemporary (2018), portraits of women she knows and ceramics at the Kewenig gallery in Berlin (2021), and a garden and canvases with embroidered phrases about the rolling back of women's rights in the exhibition “My Body, My Choice” at the Goodman Gallery in London (2022). Amer's work is held by the Centre Pompidou, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Israel Museum, the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, the Samsung Museum in Seoul and Crystal Bridges in Arkansas. She lives and works in New York.