Ghada Amer - Artist of interest
GHADA AMER endeavors to create a new visual language, one that goes well beyond the neat outlines of her Domestic series. As her figures become more expressive around 1993, her canvases acquire more textuality. If little paint appeared on her canvases at the time, colored thread itself emerges as a new kind of painting.
The textuality of her paintings is achieved through a very precise layering of acrylic paint, embroidery, and gel medium, a technique that has since become her signature composition.
The gel medium is applied to each canvas only once the paint is dried and the embroidery completed. Standing in front of the canvas hanging vertically on the wall of her studio, Ghada Amer combs through the loose ends of the thread with one hand before fixing them on the canvas with the gel medium. Once dry, the cascading lines of the thread are set/glued onto the canvas and result in what Ghada Amer refers to as her “drips”.
The drips are thus a formal strategy intended to add a painterly quality to the thread. Although the imagery Ghada Amer utilizes is representational (women from porn magazines), the drips largely (un)intentionally obscure the erotic images that are embroidered. Viewers are often teased into playing hide and seek with each of Ghada Amer’s paintings. They are caught trying to tease out the figures from underneath the layers of thread, of loops and lines that are glued on the canvas, a playful experience of peekaboo, of presence and absence, of visibility and invisibility.
Once again, Ghada Amer’s use of embroidery is intended as an artistic language that is both opposed to and in dialogue with painting. Unlike paint, the very use of thread allows the artist to work directly with and through the figures. It is a medium that blurs the boundary between object and painting, craft, and art, and that interrupts immediate identification of her subject matter. By interfering with a linear reading or interpretation of her works. Ghada Amer invites the viewer to stop and think, thus inscribing her production within the history of abstract expressionism.
Color Misbehavior (2009)
Ghada Amer’s embroidered paintings deliberately recall those of Abstract Expressionism from afar – a nod to the prominent movement dominated by men and to the various formal strategies they are associated with, most notably expressive strokes, dripped paint, monochromes, and the grid.
In fact, some of Ghada Amer’s titles evoke directly a number of major male canonical painters and position the artist (as a woman) within a history of art that has excluded women for far too long.
In this regard, Ghada Amer’s “The Turkish Bath” (2006) is a nod to Ingres’ painting of the same title, while her Nympheas series (2011, 2018) are obviously a homage to Monet’s paintings of the same title. The new Albers (2002), like her Grids series, are Ghada Amer’s feminine and feminist version of Frank Stella’s symbols of rationality and order or of Josef Albers’s geometric abstraction works. If her Drips series remind us of Jackson Pollok, her Monochromes (Another Black Painting, Lady in Pink, White) evidently remind us of absolute abstraction, as in the various types of monochrome art created by Kazimir Malevitch, and of minimalism and conceptual art. And of course, one can discover many other references to master painters from the past whether explicitly referenced or not (Matisse and Fernand Léger among others).
Color Misbehavior, 2009, Ebroidery and gel medium on canvas, 70x59in
From the Drips to the Big Bang
The development of Ghada Amer’s new visual language reaches its pinnacle with Color Misbehavior (2009), a work that is, for the artist, as important as her first painting, “Cinq femmes au travail” (1991).
It was only when I finished Color Misbehavior (2009) that I suddenly felt that I could paint after all these years. This painting is as important to me as my first work, Cinq femmes au travail, 1991. When I did that painting in the early 1990s, I knew I was developing the language of thread. With Color Misbehavior, produced some twenty years later, I discovered that I could actually paint gesturally with thread. While I had been developing a language and a grammar, I was now able to write full sentences. Gradually the subject matter of my painting has become less important to me. Yes, they are still porn women, but I am more interested in the actual technique now.
Ghada Amer
Over the years, Amer has continued to develop the language and thus the technique of her “drips.” In 2009, she initiated a new practice for arranging the excess threads upon the surface of her canvases. Rather than positioning herself vertically across from her work to comb through the loose threads and apply the gel medium, Ghada Amer places the embroidered canvas horizontally, face down. She lies beneath it, carefully combing the loose threads and undoing any tangles until all the threads hang perfectly. She then emerges from underneath the canvas, holds it firmly horizontally before letting it drop to the floor, letting the wind and pure chance define the shape of the threads which she then proceeds to fix with the gel. This is the birth of her Big Bang series (2010-2011). With this new process, Ghada Amer points out: “It’s the whole canvas that is actually making the paining, not my brush.”