monographie et jardins
For her first exhibition in a French institution since moving to New York, Ghada Amer is presenting some twenty embroidered canvases and textile sculptures from French and international public and private collections at the CCC.
Ghada Amer’s work reinvents embroidery, a feminine medium par excellence. The artist patiently embroiders and superimposes scenes from advertising or erotic magazines onto canvas. In this way, she questions and reappropriates the representation and identity of women as modelled by society and the male gaze. The tangle of scenes and coloured threads evokes pictorial abstraction, particularly dripping, as her work slides ever more assertively towards painting.
ghada amer
Born in 1980. She lives and works in Buenos Aires (Argentina).
She studied art at the Villa Arson in Nice and at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. In the mid-1990s, she decided to settle in New York, where she still 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 years long 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 with drawing and collage; in the mid 80’s, she decided to focus her work 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 elaborated works.
It is through that fastidious and painstaking technique that Ghada Amer has chosen to carve out her identity as an artist and a woman.
For her first exhibition in a French institution since moving to New York, Ghada Amer is presenting some twenty embroidered canvases and textile sculptures from French and international public and private collections at the CCC.
Ghada Amer’s work reinvents embroidery, a feminine medium par excellence. The artist patiently embroiders and superimposes scenes from advertising or erotic magazines onto canvas. In this way, she questions and reappropriates the representation and identity of women as modelled by society and the male gaze. The tangle of scenes and coloured threads evokes pictorial abstraction, particularly dripping, as her work slides ever more assertively towards painting.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.