ART CITIES: N.York-Ghada Amer

While Ghada Amer describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition for her abstract canvases embroidered with women’s bodies referencing pornographic imagery, she is a multimedia artist whose entire body of work (bronze sculptures, clay ceramics, prints, installations, videos, and outdoor gardens) is infused with the same ideological and aesthetic concerns

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marianne Boesky Gallery

In her solo exhibition “Disobedient Thoughts”, Ghada Amer Amer presents a suite of new embroidered paintings alongside experimental sculptures in ceramic, bronze, and steel. Amer’s expansive, ambitious practice is a perpetual pursuit of new forms and methods of expression. Working across painting, sculpture, ceramic, and garden installation, Amer appropriates and reinterprets the predominantly masculine tropes of Western art history. Stridently, straightforwardly political in her approach, Amer reimagines the feminized materials and subjects of such histories in order to insert herself into the canon.  In 1984, Amer entered art school in France intent on pursuing the study of painting—only to find herself routinely denied admittance to painting classes reserved for men. Vexed, she turned to history books determined to locate her own aspirations within a lineage of women painters—her efforts were in vain: the canon of western painting at the time was completely dominated by men. A few years later, on a trip to visit family in Cairo, Amer encountered a sewing pattern in a women’s magazine—and it sparked an idea: she could use embroidery thread on canvas as if it were paint. It presented both a practical and conceptual solution to the problem she had encountered in school: Amer knew how to sew—and by incorporating a traditionally feminine technique, she could also slyly take aim at the masculinist history of painting. By the early 1990s, Amer had established a material and formal language for painting with embroidery that she has continued to hone for the past 35 years. Onto the surface of the canvas, Amer embroiders spare images—often borrowed from pornography—of women in moments of ecstasy, pleasure, and tenderness. With the excess thread from these drawings, Amer creates abstract compositions that frequently allude to the work of famous male painters whose work she has long admired. Amer presents her most ambitious embroidered paintings—in both scale and process—to date in the exhibition. With The “Lilly Puddle” (2025) and “The Ladies of Giverny” (2025) Amer refers to Claude Monet’s light-infused water lilies and sheaves of grain. With “The Grid of 2025” (2025 Amer alludes to the sharp geometries of Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, or a litany of modernist painters committed to investigating the grid. “My Homage to the Square 1” (2025) and “My Homage to the Square 2” (2025) quote Josef Albers’ series of more than a thousand “Homage to the Square” paintings. In all of these works, the referential compositions of excess threads—which are attached to the surface of the painting with a gel medium—obscure the drawings of women beneath, a subtle but intentional nod by Amer to the ways in which women have been obscured from art’s histories. In 2014—following forays into garden installations and metal sculpture—Amer became interested in ceramic. Experimenting with the medium under the tutelage of Adam Welch at Greenwich House Pottery in New York, Amer created a new body of work, the “Thoughts” from the scraps created in the process of making her painted ceramic slab works. With her left hand—her nondominant hand—Amer sculpts the clay scraps according to instinct and intuition, a process akin to the automatic writing and drawing favored by the Surrealists. The resulting sculptures are twisting, contorting forms—which the artist finishes in brilliant chromatic hues, continuing her endless pursuit of painting. For the exhibition, Amer has translated these thoughts into cast bronze and steel—a process that has sent her to Mexico, China, and upstate New York to consult with expert metal founders to achieve the form, colors, and textures she sought. The resulting “Thoughts” far grander in scale than those made in ceramic—embody Amer’s latest foray into expanding her vocabulary of expression. Throughout her career, Amer has constantly sought subversion: an underlying, simmering rage about the place of women in history, in art, and in society has driven her to persistent, perpetual investigation and creation. For more than 35 years, Amer’s practice has followed a constant thread of disobedient thoughts, one following the next, all in pursuit of painting—even, as curator Susan Thompson notes, she has been deferred and redirected. Amer has mastered this subversion—drawing women into the fold of all manner of artmaking through imagery, through material, through form, through message. Yet, while Amer’s work is stridently political and doggedly disobedient, it also revels in hope, beauty, and freedom—and a deep, abiding love for the history of painting itself.

Photo: Ghada Amer, THE LILLY PUDDLE [detail], 2025, Embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 88 x 48 inches, 223.5 x 121.9 cm, © Ghada Amer, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery

Info: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 1/5-15/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://marianneboeskygallery.com/