Ghada Amer, 1963

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963. Her parents left Egypt for France in 1974 and Amer started her artistic training at Villa Arson, France, ten years later. Amer received both her BA and MA from École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche (EPIAR). She was also educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris. She lives and works in New York.

Ghada Amer’s works question social and political divisions between East and West and between feminine and masculine. Ideas of conventionality and new forms of representation, executed through the tense duality of art and craft, situate Amer’s pieces in the realm of divergence. With needle and thread as her delicate mode of application, she juxtaposes heavy stains of acrylic paint with the slenderness of colored thread. At times tangled and overlaid, threads create a curtain-like effect which enable the embroidered nude female figures appear to float to the surface. Amer forms moments of scrutiny for the viewers, in which erotic imagery begins to reveal itself after a few seconds of looking.

In “Sunset in Isfahan”, Amer covers the surface of the canvas with several female figures, who although at first glance are very alike, taken from the same archetypal form, also appear different from one another. The title of this work makes direct reference to Isfahan, which represents an evocative geographical juxtaposition, being at the intersection of the main north-south and east-west routes crossing Iran.