Ghada Amer The Virgin without the child , 2016 Painting Work: 127 x 107 x 4 cm
Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose body of work is anchored and informed by ongoing ideological and aesthetic concerns: the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her artistic practice. Many of Ghada Amer’s paintings make art historical references in subversive and humorous ways.
The Virgin without the child speaks to Amer’s interest in subverting assumptions related to the roles and attributes assigned to women, 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.
