Through her artistic practice, Ghada Amer constantly aims to upend the traditional hierarchies of painting, and engage with the intentional reorientation of gaze through a feminist lens. She is greatly influenced by French feminist thinkers such as Helene Cixous, who wrote the famous 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” and advocated for women’s ability to create their own language and write about their own experience in order to transform themselves from object to subject.

Study for Sculpture 7 is executed on used cardboard, a material that is frequently used and discarded in our age of online consumption and globalization. Amer imagines cardboard as a material that is at once surface and space, always transient in both its nature and its form. On the cardboard, Amer has appropriated an image of a woman from a pornographic magazine, and imbued it with a tenderness that defies its original context. Her figure, drawn on a cardboard box without an address or destination, is now a resident of this ‘flying landscape’. Created as a study for a monumental bronze sculpture from the series the Paravent Girls, this work is a large-scale display of women's joy and sensuality.