Subscribe to our newsletter for our must-see exhibitions, artists, events and more here
Shop William Kentridge Prints here

Ghada Amer | In Black and White

02 December - 09 January 2021
Goodman Gallery, London

Goodman Gallery presents a selection of Ghada Amer’s signature thread and canvas works alongside a series of abstract and image-driven ceramic objects. In Black and White marks Amer’s first London presentation in almost two decades and precedes the artist’s full solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery London in 2022.

Over thirty years, Amer has dedicated her multidisciplinary practice to questioning binary perceptions: ‘East’ versus ‘West’; feminine versus masculine; art versus craft. Her work subverts assumptions related to the roles and attributes assigned to women in Middle Eastern and Western societies, rejecting both religious-driven laws that govern women’s bodies as well as second-wave feminist ideas that reject expressions of conventional femininity as an avenue to empowerment.

The humorous and transgressive erotic embroideries, which brought Amer to prominence in the 1990s, depict explicit female forms with the delicacy of needle and thread. Amer’s unique application of tumbling thickets of thread glued to the canvas evokes the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. This Art Historical reference is at the centre of Amer’s attempts to rethink painting as a medium reserved for men and in which women tend to feature as objects of a male gaze.

Artworks

Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas
Work: 149.9 x 182.9 cm
Work: 45.7 x 66 cm
Unavailable
Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas
Work: 91.4 x 106.7 cm
Glazed ceramic with porcelain inlay
Work: 63.5 x 86.4 x 30.5 cm

Films

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.

Download full CV