Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963 and raised in France where she studied at Villa Arson, Nice. She currently lives and works in New York. Her wide-ranging practice spans painting, sculpture, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Over the course of her multi-decade career, Amer has created an aesthetic and conceptual language that confronts the systemic subjugation of the female voice and body. Recognizing the ways in which women are taught, almost from birth, to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks, creating a space that recognizes and celebrates female autonomy, sexuality, and liberation. “I believe that all women should like their bodies and use them as tools of seduction,” Amer stated.

During her artistic studies, Amer was routinely turned away from painting classes reserved for men. Infuriated, she turned to art history books, hoping to find precedent of female painters. The pursuit was futile as the books of the canon available to her were awash in male painters. Realizing that gender was prescribed even in art making, Amer sought subversion, and by the early 1990s had developed her own visual language of taking thread to canvas rather than paint. Embroidery constituted women’s work, and Amer’s earliest embroidered canvases depicted women performing their prescribed unpaid domestic labor, melding form and content. This objective was illustrated further in 1992 when Amer made her first embroidered canvas depicting a pornographic image in linework. Now iconic among her oeuvre, such motifs give exposure to women’s autonomous desires.

While Amer is most widely recognized for her embroidered canvases, she has produced a deeply varied body of work. In 2014, she began experimenting with ceramics, following an initial interest in learning how to create prototypes for her large-scale bronze sculptures. Ceramics gave Amer a newfound freedom, allowing her to separate from the context and history that led to her embroidered works and providing a new platform through which to examine color, line, shape, and texture.