NEW YORK––Ghada Amer‘s exhibition of recent paintings and sculptures at Cheim & Read (April 5 – May 12, 2018) is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Jenni Sorkin. This is Amer’s fourth solo show with the gallery and also presents, for the first time in depth, the artist’s recent foray into ceramics.
Exhibition view
Amer’s works reference historical sources in subversive and humorous ways. For example, White Girls (2017) and White-RFGA (2018) subtly makes racial commentary, critiquing whiteness as a convention while addressing Robert Ryman’s minimalist monochrome works. Landscape with Black Mountains-RFGA (2017) conflates the female form as a pastoral setting, while cascading and pooling threads, omnipresent in Amer’s works, recall Jackson Pollock.
“Ghada Amer has utilized the lush landscape of the art historical past from which to plunder—re-casting the role of women as subject, versus object.” ––Sorkin
Left: WHITE GIRLS, 2017, Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 64 x 72 inches; Right: SCULPTURE IN BLACK, RED AND WHITE, 2017, Glazed ceramic, 22 1/2 x 34 x 21 inches
Amer’s signature style of contoured figures appears in the rough ceramic forms, but instead of being partially obscured by dense thread, the figures are rendered by bleeding colored slips into the earthenware form. Her intense engagement with the material conditions of ceramics to depict painterly concerns is apparent.
“Though these works fit within a continuation of the ceramic figurative tradition, she defies convention, converting her clay canvases into three-dimensional form. Many artists currently converging on the medium generally do so in a manner distinct from their other art practice. Ghada set out to close the distance across her mediums.” ––Adam Welch, director of Greenwich House Pottery
Exhibition view
Exhibition view
Exhibition view
Ghada Amer, MA VENUS DE MILO, 2017, Glazed ceramic, 24 x 39 x 9 1/2 inches
Ghada Amer, PORTRAIT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WOMAN, 2017 , Glazed ceramic , 36 x 24 x 8 inches
Ghada Amer, SCULPTURE IN BLACK, RED AND WHITE, 2017, Glazed ceramic, 22 1/2 x 34 x 21 inches
Ghada Amer, THE RED PORTRAIT, 2017, Glazed ceramic, 22 7/8 x 31 x 16 inches
Ghada Amer, LANDSCAPE WITH BLACK MOUNTAINS-RFGA, 2017
Acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas, 45 x 45 inches
About the artist: Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963. She attended the Villa Arson in Nice, France, where she graduated with an MFA in painting in 1989, and now lives and works in New York. Her work was the subject of a Brooklyn Museum survey show in 2008, titled Love Has No End.Amer’s work is represented in many American and international permanent collections, including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel. Later this year, her work will be the focus of solo exhibitions at Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré,Tours, from June 1 through October, and at the Dallas Contemporary opening September 22, which will feature her ceramic works.
Text (edited) from gallery.
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