Artist · Egypt
Ghada Amer
Ghada Amer (born 1963) is an Egyptian-born artist based in New York. She is best known for paintings in which she embroiders figures of women — often taken from erotic magazines — and quotations onto canvas, leaving the threads hanging so that they blur and veil the images. Using a craft long assigned to women, her work deals with desire, gender and power. She won a UNESCO Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and also makes sculptures and gardens.
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Cairo and Nice
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963. When she was eleven, her family moved to France, and she grew up in Nice. She studied art at the Villa Arson school in Nice, finishing in 1989, and at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. She has said that as a student she was told painting was a male domain; her response was to paint with a needle. In 1997 she received a Pollock-Krasner grant.
Painting with thread
From the early 1990s Amer began to "paint" with embroidery, and she first showed her embroidered canvases in 1992. On canvases covered with fields of acrylic colour she stitches outline drawings of women, often traced from pornographic magazines, repeating them across the surface. She leaves the ends of the threads long and loose, and they fall over the figures like tangled hair or brushstrokes, so that the images appear and disappear depending on where you stand.
How to look at an Amer: stand back first, so that the colour field and the loose threads read as a painting, and then come close. The figures resolve into line, and the thread, the labour and the subject begin to matter together. Notice where the thread crosses the figure and where it hangs free. That reading is this site's own.
The choice is pointed. Embroidery is a craft long taught to women at home, associated with patience and modesty; Amer uses it to show women's bodies and pleasure, on women's own terms. Other works stitch quotations — definitions of love, fairy tales, words from the Qur'an or from feminist writers — into the canvas.
Sculptures and gardens
Amer also works outside the canvas. She makes sculptures, including cut-out steel and bronze letters and figures, and gardens: planted works in which flowers or grass spell out words about love, women or war. With her long-time collaborator Reza Farkhondeh she has produced paintings and prints together under the name RFGA; one source dates the partnership to the early 2000s, when Farkhondeh painted on one of her canvases.
At the 1999 Venice Biennale she received a UNESCO Prize, and her work has since been shown in major museums in the United States, Europe and the Arab world. A retrospective was held at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008, and the Mucem in Marseille ran what it called the first retrospective of her work in France, A Woman's Voice Is Revolution, from 2 December 2022 to 16 April 2023, curated by Hélia Paukner and Philippe Dagen and split across the Mucem, the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and the chapel of the Vieille Charité. In the garden of Fort Saint-Jean she placed Corten steel letters spelling an Arabic phrase, Sawt al-mar'ati thawra (a woman's voice is revolution), a deliberate alteration of a controversial saying that a woman's voice is something to be hidden; the letters are filled with coal, a reference to revolt and to the pyres on which women accused of witchcraft were burned. She lives and works in New York.
Where to see the work
Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, among others; ask each which pieces are on view. Gagosian and the Goodman Gallery are among the galleries that have shown her.
See also
The Egyptian painter Inji Aflatoun, who painted women prisoners in the 1960s; Wael Shawky and Anna Boghiguian, other Egyptian artists working internationally; African women artists; and our lists of Egyptian artists and Egyptian sculptors.