Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer (غادة عامر; May 22, 1963, in Cairo, Egypt ) is a contemporary artist, much of her work deals with issues of gender and sexuality.

Her most notable body of work involves highly layered embroidered paintings of women's bodies referencing pornographic imagery.

Amer had previously emigrated from Egypt to France at the age of 11 and was educated in Paris and Nice.

She is currently living and working in New York City.

Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt she has lived in France for twenty years, and doesn't consider herself singularly Egyptian, African or French.

When she was growing up in Cairo, her mother, an agronomist, made business suits for herself, and local women would often gather to sew.

Amer's father, Mohamed Amer, was a diplomat and moved the family many times, not only to France but to such countries as Libya, Morocco and Algeria.

For her, this exposure to different cultures are ultimately the most important biographical details needed to understand her art.

Amer's art practice began in a fascination with sentimental, romantic postcards and illustrations.

Her favored theme remains idyllic images of women in love.

After having total art freedom in Egypt, Amer decided to become an artist after experiencing what it is like to have your art controlled.

‘We had to learn perspective, representation, and it was completely controlled,’ Ghada stated in an interview.

Her most prominent and signature formal style is Embroidery, a medium taken up by feminist artist since the 1970s as a political tool.

Her work is feminist, subverting the traditionally masculine genre of painting, and its rejection of the norms of female sexuality.

Her oeuvre includes examples of painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation.

When Amer returned to France from Boston, she became fascinated with Rosemarie Trockel.

“She had successfully invented a language for women using knitting, and I liked her use of commercial and political symbols, as well.” Amer's multiple geographic relocations are reflected in her work.

Her painting is influenced by the idea of shifting meanings and the appropriation of the languages of abstraction and expressionism.

Her work adopts "politically incorrect" imagery for subversive purposes.

Amer studied at the Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Nice, France where she received her B.F.A. degree in painting in 1986 and in 1989, she received her M.F.A. degree from the same institution.

She met Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh while studying in France, they became friends and later worked together.

While receiving her degrees, Amer studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987.

She also studied at Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques for some time as well.

In 1991, Amer's Cinq Femmes Au Travail embroidery stitching techniques to show women performing tasks that had been advertised for women in magazines—childcare, house cleaning, and cooking.

The quadriptych is constructed as neatly stitched line drawings on unprimed canvases.

In 1996, Amer and Farkhondeh moved to New York City.

A multimedia artist, Amer is known for her abstract canvases that combine painting with needlework.

Her work frequently addresses issues of femininity, sexuality, postcolonial identities, and Islamic culture.

She is most famous for her large-scale paintings wherein embroidered images of women in autoerotic poses (traced from porn magazines) are layered over abstract monochromatic drips and washes of acrylic paint.

As a student in the BFA and MFA programs, she was informed that her art school's painting classes were reserved for male students, at which point she became committed to finding her own feminine artistic language with which to speak about women, as a woman.

“It was then that, suddenly, I realized I was a woman.

I decided to speak about this – and to make painting at the same time.

This is what I’m doing.

It’s painting with the conscience that I’m a woman.’ Innovative and provocative, she used sewing and embroidery—skills learned from her mother and grandmother and typically associated as "women's work"—as a medium for celebrating and asserting women into the art world.

Amer's approach to mediums and subjects from an emphatically female perspective manifest itself throughout her career.

She specifically looks for women who are posing erotically and/or involved in explicit pornographic acts.

Once she makes her selection, she traces the women onto Vellum paper with pencil for future use, when she eventually transfers them onto a canvas or uses them as source material for works on paper.

Together friends Amer and Reza Farkhondeh collaborated on art drawings and prints, under the name "RFGA" starting in the early 2000s.

Amer would create visual explorations of female sexuality, and Farkhondeh would add imagery of forms and the beauty of nature.

The collaboration came about after Farkhondeh painted on one of Amer's canvases, she liked his contribution and while it started as a game it later turned into a mutual agreement.