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Ghada Amer, Reza Farkhondeh & Collaborative Work / No Romance

17 February - 02 April 2011
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg is pleased to present No Romance, a three person-exhibition featuring individual works by Ghada Amer, Reza Farkhondeh and collaborative work by the two artists.

Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh met in art school in Nice in 1988. They both moved to New York in 1996 where they established studios in Harlem. The collaborative works between Amer and Farkhondeh started by accident in the early 2000s. “I began to paint on canvasses that Ghada was preparing for her work,” explained Farkhondeh in an interview with Martine Antle in the catalogue for The Gardens Next Door at Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon, 2010. “I would apply acrylic paint using masking tape. That was the beginning of new experimentation and of new discoveries… A little later I began to [make] watercolours and this time Ghada intervened on them… And gradually we created together a body of works on paper… One of the secrets is coming to appreciate sharing territory without destroying harmony and not thinking of establishing one’s ego as the sole winner in the collaborative work.” Their collaborative process involves passing the drawings back and forth until each artist is creatively satisfied. The show at Goodman Gallery presents a sampling of several series that the two artists have developed since 2005, including three large new works on paper. Women and nature are the themes of their collaborations.

Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt. She graduated from Villa Arson in Nice, France with an MFA in painting in 1989. For over 20 years Amer has been producing works that are profoundly linked to an aesthetic language specific to women. She chooses needle and thread as her medium to question the classifications of sexuality, beauty, gender and domesticity. “What interests me,” explained Amer in the exhibition catalogue for her show in Brétigny-sur-Orge in 1994, “is the idea of a ‘model to be followed’, and in life we are confronted with these everywhere; from birth one is shown how one must live; one is educated this way, one grows up and follows the model imposed on us. All my work revolves around the idea of ‘a model’.” Amer’s individual contribution to No Romance is a new series of embroidered paintings and a sculpture: 100 words of love – an amorphous, spherical and hollow work, displaying carved out synonyms for the word ”love” in Arabic.

Artworks

Mixed media on paper
134 x 190.5 cm
Unavailable
Mixed media on paper
97.8 x 73.7 cm
Unavailable
Watercolour and embroidery on paper
130.8 x 209.6 cm
Unavailable
Embroidery and gel medium on canvas
182.9 x 162.6 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic and fabric on canvas
Work: 142 x 193 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic on canvas
Work: 127 x 152.5 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic on canvas
Work: 127 x 152.5 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic on canvas
Work: 183 x 213.5 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic and fabric on canvas
Work: 157.5 x 198 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic and tape on canvas
Work: 56 x 61 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic and tape on canvas
Work: 71 x 96.5  cm
Unavailable

About

Ghada Amer image

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 and moved to Nice, France when she was eleven years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989), during which she also studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1991 she moved to Paris to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996 for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.

Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Further, she often collaborates with her long-time friend Reza Farkhondeh. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

Amer’s work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. Among invitations to prestigious group shows and biennials—such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007—she was given a midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Multiple institutions across Marseille, France are currently co-organising a retrospective for 2022 that will travel to the United States and Asia.

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Reza Farkhondeh & Ghada Amer image

Reza Farkhondeh & Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer (b. 1963, Cairo, Egypt) and Reza Farkhondeh (b. 1963, Iran) have cultivated an artistic collaboration spanning over 20 years, though they have only recently begun to exhibit their collective works publicly, under the moniker RFGA. This partnership seamlessly merges their two distinctive styles to create a dynamic visual vocabulary.

Amer and Farkhondeh’s previous collaborative solo exhibitions include those at Tina Kim Fine Arts, New York, the Singapore Tyler Institute, The Stedlijk Museum in the Netherlands, Goodman Gallery Cape Town

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