Livre - Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer est une artiste d’origine égyptienne qui vit et travaille à New York dont le travail mêle la peinture à la broderie. L’oppression croissante des femmes dans le monde entier et l’expérience d’exclusion liée au sexisme qu’elle a subi à l’école de beaux-arts en France lui ont inspiré une rébellion contre le patriarcat, sentiment qui nourrit son œuvre au travers des décennies. Se voyant refuser l’accès au monde de la peinture dominé par les hommes, Ghada Amer transcrit son amour pour ce médium en lui consacrant sa vie par d’autres moyens. Adoptant des matériaux et des processus historiquement définis comme féminins, elle peint ainsi avec du fil, et ses toiles brodées sont devenues sa marque de fabrique. Ghada Amer transpose ce procédé dans ses jardins où elle peint avec des plantes et de la terre, tandis que dans ses céramiques, elle peint avec de l’argile. À travers ses oeuvres, l’artiste interroge les constructions sociales du genre ainsi que la position et la représentation de la femme dans l’art et la société. L’art de Ghada Amer est une peinture de révolte. Ghada Amer is an Egyptian artist living and working in New York. The increasing oppression of women worldwide and the exclusionary experience of sexism at art school in France inspired in Amera resolute rebellion against patriarchy that would motivate and propel her artistic strategy for decades. Denied access to the male-dominated world of painting, she channeled her abiding love for this medium into a lifelong pursuit of painting by other means. Painting with thread, she embraced materials and processes that have been historically coded as feminine, and her embroidered canvases have become her signature. Transferring this process to gardens, Ghada Amer paints also with plants and earth, and in her ceramics, she paints with clay. Through her works, the artist questions the social construction of gender and the position of women and their representation within art and society at large. The art of Ghada Amer is a painting in revolt. The gender politics of abstraction: embroidered paintings and more from Ghada Amer New York-based painter and embroiderer Ghada Amer (born 1963) was raised in Cairo, Egypt, and later educated in Nice and Paris, France. Her experiences with sexism in both locations served as the impetus for her to forge new ground in a range of mediums, from painting and sculpture to ceramics and earthworks. With a background in abstract painting, Amer eventually turned to embroidery as a strategy for infiltrating the male space of painting with a material traditionally associated with women. Her work is frequently based on the images of female figures found in magazines, through which she explores the constructions of gender, sexuality and eroticism. Her embroidery is intentionally loose, with threads dangling from the canvas, provoking a pictorial effect not unlike Pollock’s splattered paint. More recent works introduce a verbal element, with quotations and aphorisms. This volume reproduces these pieces along with a selection of works from across her career.