Ghada Amer
By Rachel Jorgensen
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt. She gained her MFA in painting at the Villa Arson EPIAR in Nice, France in 1989. Ghada now lives and works in New York where she continues to challenge the mind of society as well as the individuals that compose it with her thought provoking paintings, drawings, sculptures, and gardens. Ghada Amer’s art work is very intentionally feminine, seeking to empower woman in any way she can.
Intentionally feminine but not stereotypical, Ghada’s work is more honest than that. The artist attempts to portray women as they are, rather than how society expects them to be.
In her paintings Ghada uses mixed media such as acrylic paint, or gel, almost always accompanied by some type of embroidery. Again this is intentional on the artist’s part to convey a message about femininity to her audience.
“The history of art was written by men, in practice and in theory. Painting has a symbolic and dominant place inside this history, and in the twentieth century it became the major expression of masculinity, especially through abstraction. For me, the choice to be mainly a painter and to use the codes of abstract painting, as they have been defined historically, is not only an artistic challenge: its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically. I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery.” -Ghada Amer.
Often used to explore her own sexuality, Ghada creates many paintings and other art work demonstrating strong erotic themes. Some are more obvious than others, some are left for a more keen observer to find in the detail of the work.
In the above painting you see that Ghada has included well known Disney princesses, a theme found in many of her works. She creates a contrast between child and adulthood and at the same time shines light on the figures that young girls are modeling themselves after and what message the princesses convey to developing girls and boys.
As you can see the princesses resemble those in a coloring book, scribbled through by a young child. In the background you see these finely crafted embroidered figures of a nude woman. The artist did not specify what she meant by this but one interpretation that comes to mind is again an exploration of femininity and sexuality.
Other times Ghada creates this contrast without the use of princesses, merely by adding children to the background of an extremely erotic image of a nude woman.
These drawings and prints are used by Ghada, again to explore her own sexuality, but also to really emphasize that woman have it in themselves to explore their own bodies and their own sense of womanhood and sexuality. Ghada wants to empower woman and that is clear in her work.
Aside from her starkly feminine work in her drawings and paintings, Ghada also explores themes of love, war, and peace in her highly critical gardens.
The one I am highlighting is Ghada’s Peace Garden.
Peace Garden – Miami Botanical Garden, 2002 – Miami, Florida USA
“Peace Garden consists of the universal peace symbol, first designed as a symbol for the Ban the Bomb movement in the 1950s, made of carnivorous plants. The garden is also part of a performance in which attendants serve live worms and crickets to visitors who in turn feed them to the plants. The use of carnivorous plants to construct a peace sign represents the shift in attitude of an earlier generation that once strongly promoted and used the peace symbol but then, over time, came to take causes for peace much less seriously.”
Overall it is clear that Ghada owns a passion for her work and her message. Some artists don’t like to be political, they make art for different reasons.. Ghada makes art for herself, she creates a message for others. Important, relevant messages that need to be heard as they address problems that people have faced both historically and in today’s modern world.
References:
http://www.ghadaamer.com/ghada/Ghada_Amer.html
http://flavorwire.com/423765/24-powerful-works-by-contemporary-women-artists-you-should-know/3