dark continent & cactus painting
After the major monographic exhibition that the ccc dedicated to Ghada Amer in 2000, she is back in France with a new proposal that features her recent New York works. This is a rare opportunity to rediscover the work of this key artist on the international contemporary art scene through two exhibitions at the ccc od.
Twenty or so of her works fill the art centre’s black gallery: embroidered canvases, produced in a style unique to her, bringing her fame in the 1990s, brought together with her latest sculptural research in which she explores metal.
In the Nave, she has revived on a monumental scale her Cactus Painting, an inner garden intended as a distorted and biting reference to the great tradition of American abstract 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.
After the major monographic exhibition that the ccc dedicated to Ghada Amer in 2000, she is back in France with a new proposal that features her recent New York works. This is a rare opportunity to rediscover the work of this key artist on the international contemporary art scene through two exhibitions at the ccc od.
Twenty or so of her works fill the art centre’s black gallery: embroidered canvases, produced in a style unique to her, bringing her fame in the 1990s, brought together with her latest sculptural research in which she explores metal.
In the Nave, she has revived on a monumental scale her Cactus Painting, an inner garden intended as a distorted and biting reference to the great tradition of American abstract painting.
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