PRESENTATION: Ghada Amer-New Works
Ghada Amer is best known for her subversive embroidered paintings that appropriate imagery from pornographic magazines as a means of creating an entirely feminine and feminist language of painting. She studied at the Villa Arson in Nice, where she was told that certain painting classes were reserved exclusively for male students. This served as the pivotal moment for Amer’s practice, at which point she began to create her own unique space within the medium of painting.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marianne Boesky Gallery Archive
In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, ceramic, garden, and installation, Ghada Amer pulls at the threads of cultural dualities—feminine and masculine, craft and art, figuration and abstraction, East and West—with sensitivity and specificity. Appropriating sexualized imagery—often sourced from pornographic magazines—Amer subverts the masculinist tropes that permeate them, reimagining women in moments of ecstasy, pleasure, and tenderness. For “New Yorks” her first solo exhibition in Aspen, Amer brings together two of her recent, materially innovative bodies of work: the “Paravent Girls” and “QR CODES REVISITED”. Beginning their lives as abandoned cardboard boxes found on the street, Amer’s “Paravent Girls” take a rich material journey before arriving at their final bronze form. On the surface of the flattened boxes, the artist draws the faces of anonymized women, the excess ink from her deceptively simple line drawings trailing delicately down the corrugated texture of the surface of each box. Amer transfers these tender portraits to clay, redrawing each figures’ features in relief in the soft, earthen material manipulated by hand before casting them in bronze. The “Paravent Girls” bear the physical traces of Amer’s materials and process. Although rendered in bronze, they retain the form and memory of the cardboard boxes from which they were made. The metaphorical potential of the work is evident from their titles: the series exemplify Amer’s interest in notions of the gaze and the dynamics invested in the act of looking. The sculptures form paravents—screens used to separate a room, to differentiate between public and private spaces, to conceal, to withhold, to create a sense of mystery. Yet, Amer’s figures—captured here in moments of intimacy and eroticism—are revealed, perpetually, to the viewer. With “QR CODES REVISITED”, Amer reimagines a textile appliqué craft long associated with male tentmakers in Egypt. In the ancient tradition of khayamiya, richly colored appliqué panels are used to decorate the interiors of tents and pavilions for weddings and other celebrations. Amer reappropriates the craft, transforming it into abstract grids of monochromatic, geometric patterns, reminiscent of the ubiquitous form of QR codes. Within the seemingly-abstract surfaces, Amer embeds feminist texts—some English, some Arabic, all using stylized, abstracted characters. Amer frequently incorporates language into her work, often borrowing pithy aphorisms from other feminist activists, artists, and writers. She takes a similar approach in this body of work, incorporating the famous quote by Egyptian feminist activist Nawal El Saadawi, “plastic surgery is a postmodern veil,” as well as an excerpt by Simone de Beauvoir. Embedding these texts within her work, Amer once again refutes the objectification of women—deploying instead the voices of feminist writers to reclaim agency for women everywhere.
Photo: Ghada Amer, GIRLS IN WHITE AND GOLD, 2024 Bronze, 15 x 18 x 9 inches, 38.1 x 45.7 x 22.9 cm, Edition of 6 plus 1 artist’s proof (AP 1/1), © Ghada Amer,Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery
Info: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 616 East Hyman Ave, Aspen, CO, USA, Duration: 25/6-27/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://marianneboeskygallery.com/
