Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer (born in 1963 in Cairo) is an Egyptian painter and embroiderer. She studied at the Villa Arson in Nice and at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. The increasing oppression of women in Egypt and the exclusionary experience of sexism at art school in France inspired in Amer a resolute rebellion against patriarchy that would motivate and propel her artistic strategy for decades to come.

With a background in painting, influenced in particular by abstract expressionism, she then decided turn to embroidery as a strategy for infiltrating the male space of painting with a material of traditional female expertise. She bases her early work on the images of female figures found in magazines, thus exploring the construction of the place occupied by women, sexuality, and love in contemporary societies. Her embroidery is loose, threads dangle from the canvas, provoking a pictorial effect resembling that of Pollock’s dripping.

Her recent work merges text and imagery in her embroidered paintings, layering famous quotations and pithy aphorisms-often regarding themes surrounding women and power-with close-up portraits of women’s faces. For Amer, embroidery has been the symbol of her lifelong revolt-a tool for fighting women’s exclusion from the rarefied space of painting. That revolt has been the impetus for her to forge new ground, not only in the arena of painting, but in sculpture, ceramics, and earthworks as well.

She currently lives and works between New York and Paris and has exhibited among others at the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Whitney Biennale, and the Brooklyn Museum.

About the Author

Susan Thompson is an independent curator and writer based in Brooklyn. From 2009-2020, she worked as a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she organized numerous exhibitions, including, most recently, Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, Simone Leigh: Loophole of Retreat, and Anicka Yi: Life Is Cheap. Thompson holds a BA in art history and political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in modern art from Columbia University.