“The women I know”, focuses on a new body of works consisting of four moving portraits of female friends in Ghada Amer’s signature embroidered painting style, along with a black and white self-portrait. The series is the latest development of Amer’s superimposition of figures and text, a visual approach she started to experiment with in 2013. For these bold and vivid depictions of friends and collaborators she departs from the stereotypical figures sourced from porn magazines and popular culture we have seen in earlier work. In these intimate portraits, supported by a strong emotional background, substance seems to emanate from the canvas, reminding us of women we know. The faces of the sitters are inextricably intertwined with a textual background made of quotes related to politics and feminism that are repeated all over the canvas. They reflect an array of the social concerns at the core of Amer’s creative process, and include phrases such as ‘Your silence will not protect you’, by feminist writer Audre Lorde, or ‘It was we the people; not we the white male citizens; nor we the male citizens; but we the whole people, who formed the Union.[…] Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less’, by activist Susan B. Anthony.
The exhibition also gathers a constellation of ceramics surveying the artist’s most recent sculptural works. Just like embroidery, ceramics is another way for Amer to paint without painting, freeing herself from subordination. The exhibition displays sculptures created over the last couple of years in two distinct formal styles: figurative plates and large ceramic slabs that Amer considers paintings, as well as purely abstract sculptures.
Ghada Amer (b. 1963 in Cairo, Egypt) lives and works in New York. A survey of her work will be published by Skira in March 2021.