Ghada Amer: Dark Continent: Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours, France
Past exhibition
Overview
The artist was born in Cairo (Egypt) in 1963; she then moved to France at the age of 11.
She studied arts at the Villa Arson in Nice, and the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. In the mid-1990s, she moved to New York where she currently resides.
Torn between two opposite cultures from her early childhood (being both French and Egyptian), Ghada Amer freely admits having experienced the need to be “just like everybody else” at a very young age. Her desire to fit society’s standards undeniably inspired her 20-year-long period of research and reflection on female stereotypes. Archetypes of love and happiness, and advertisements addressed to the "emancipated" Western woman are intertwined with images found in pornographic magazines, where the woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire.
Ghada Amer began her artistic career drawing. While attending collage in the mid-1980s, she decided to focus on sewing and textile work, using patterns from fashion magazines. Her paintings are only partially made of paint; the artist mainly relies on embroidery to create her minutely elaborate works.
It is through that fastidious and painstaking technique that Ghada Amer chose to carve out her identity as an artist and a woman.
She studied arts at the Villa Arson in Nice, and the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. In the mid-1990s, she moved to New York where she currently resides.
Torn between two opposite cultures from her early childhood (being both French and Egyptian), Ghada Amer freely admits having experienced the need to be “just like everybody else” at a very young age. Her desire to fit society’s standards undeniably inspired her 20-year-long period of research and reflection on female stereotypes. Archetypes of love and happiness, and advertisements addressed to the "emancipated" Western woman are intertwined with images found in pornographic magazines, where the woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire.
Ghada Amer began her artistic career drawing. While attending collage in the mid-1980s, she decided to focus on sewing and textile work, using patterns from fashion magazines. Her paintings are only partially made of paint; the artist mainly relies on embroidery to create her minutely elaborate works.
It is through that fastidious and painstaking technique that Ghada Amer chose to carve out her identity as an artist and a woman.
News
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Ghada Amer: Love Has No End
The Brooklyn Rail September 1, 2008Ghada Amer is best known for works that at first glance seem to be Abstract Expressionist paintings but are actually pornographic images of women embroidered...Learn More -
Veiled or Naked: Scrutinizing Women’s Roles
The New York Times June 20, 2008Lost in the festival of branding that is the Brooklyn Museum’s “©Murakami” exhibition, a retrospective of Ghada Amer opened quietly at the museum in February....Learn More
