Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer (Cairo, 22 May 1963) is an Egyptian-born visual artist who lives and works in New York. She is known for embroidered paintings that revive a traditionally feminine craft, needlework, to address gender, the oppression of women, sexuality, religious fundamentalism and cultural identity.

Born in Cairo, she was trained in France and the United States. Her father, a diplomat, moved the family repeatedly, to France and to countries such as Libya, Morocco and Algeria. The artist regards this exposure to different cultures as the most important biographical context for understanding her work. As a child she watched her mother, an agronomist, sew clothes, and saw local women gather to sew together. From the age of eleven she studied at the Villa Arson in Nice, where she worked under the French painter Noël Dolla, graduating in 1989. In 1991 she moved to Paris to enter the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques.

Her early work was influenced by Abstract Expressionism. After a stay in Egypt she gave up painting for embroidery, a handcraft associated with women. She takes her images from fashion magazines, Disney animated films, advertising and pornography, and embroiders female figures onto canvas. She leaves the reverse side of the work facing outward, with the threads hanging like lines of colour, so that the technique itself becomes a form of painting. For Amer, abstraction embodies the dominant expression of masculinity in twentieth-century art, and she builds a feminine universe through embroidery, painting and sculpture.

Key works include Five Women at Work (1991), on domestic life; Private Rooms (1998), in which she embroiders Quranic passages concerning women; Encyclopedia of Pleasure, based on a medieval Arabic treatise on pleasure; and Diana in Black Degradé, with rows of nude female silhouettes on a black ground. Since 2010 she has worked with Reza Farkhondeh, and in 2012 she reworked images from Western art history, including Ingres and Picasso, in pieces such as Who Killed the Demoiselles d'Avignon? In 2018 she presented Cactus Painting at the Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré in Tours.

Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2005, and in museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Brooklyn Museum. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1997 and the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Her legacy lies in bringing embroidery and domestic crafts into contemporary debates on gender and stereotypes.