Goodman Gallery presents, My Body My Choice - Ghada Amer’s first solo show in London in twenty years. The exhibition brings together a new body of work, including Amer’s signature thread and canvas paintings as well as sculptures and a garden installation, never before realised in the UK.
Recognising that women are taught to model behaviours and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.
Amer’s work addresses the ambiguous, transitory nature of the paradox that arises when searching for concrete definitions of East and West, feminine and masculine, art and craft. Through her paintings, sculptures and public garden projects, the artist takes traditional notions of cultural identity, abstraction, and religious fundamentalism and turns them on their heads.
In Amer’s erotic embroideries, the artist rejects oppressive laws set in place to govern women’s attitudes toward their bodies. At the same time, her work repudiates first-wave Western feminist theory that the body must be denied in order to prevent victimisation. By depicting explicit sexual acts with the delicacy of needle and thread, Amer’s figures assume a tenderness that simple objectification ignores.
Artworks
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The citations that are carefully embroidered on Amer’s paintings do not speak directly about the status of women in a particular society nor do they address what is going on in the US or in the Middle East. Rather, her paintings remind the viewer that women must be vigilant over the rights they have acquired and never take their liberation for granted:
“In Western societies, there is an assumption, especially among the younger generations, that the battle of the sexes has been won, that women have been liberated, and that their rights are secure. And yet, we are witnessing today a sharp regression of women’s rights and a stark rise of violence against women. However, in countries where one assumes women’s rights to be limited or absent, such as in Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, or Mexico, women of the younger generation know they have a lot to gain from fighting for those very same rights that are eroding in the West. So they are not letting down their guard and they are continuing to fight fiercely.”
The embroidered phrases which are repeated on the canvases relate to diverse teachings on women’s rights that have been extracted from publications written by female and male authors of varying backgrounds. These publications range from writing by Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi to American actress Angelina Jolie to former Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein. For the artist, they are “mantras, incantations that the viewer will hopefully end up remembering” as a prompt to “continuously mobilize, fight, and never let our arduously acquired rights fade away and vanish.”
The flat sculptures in the exhibition play with shadow and perspective and bear striking parallels to her well-known drip paintings. They were cast in South Africa’s well known Workhorse Bronze Foundry and have been realised as ‘drawings in space’ – a technique that the artist learnt during a residency in 2017 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. The technique involves moulding with clay before the works are cast in bronze. For Amer, this was an essential period of training that allowed her to master the process of moulding large sculptures: “I wanted to learn how to paint with clay so that I could portray women in my sculptures as expressively as I did in my painting.”
Artist Bio
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 and moved to Nice, France when she was eleven years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989), during which she also studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1991 she moved to Paris to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996 for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.
Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, as well as garden and mixed-media installations. Further, she often collaborates with her long-time friend Reza Farkhondeh. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.
Amer’s work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. Among invitations to prestigious group shows and biennials—such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennial of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007—she was given a mid career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Multiple institutions across Marseilles, France are currently co-organising a retrospective for 2022 that will travel to the United States and Asia.
