Ghada Amer: Representing Women's Sexuality

Girls in White

The cultural supplement of Al Nahar newspaper has an article in Arabic about Ghada Amer, an Egyptian woman artist whose art deals with women's bodies and sexualities. According to the article, entitled "Ghada Amer's Erotica," her paintings were banned from an exhibit in Singapore.

A Kiss from Alison

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"Since the mid 1990s, Amer has also incorporated more direct images of sexuality into her richly textured canvases. Amer often uses images of women in explicit sexual poses, copied from softcore pornographic magazines, reproducing a selected image repetitiously across the canvas. Here she recalls another technique from the history of embroidery, namely patterning, the repetition of a selected image also results in the blurring of the image, as if to render it mute or abstract. At the same time, Amer has begun to color her canvases, pouring and blotching paint over parts of the painting before embroidering into it. By taking on methods of painting that were first introduced and canonized by Abstract Expressionism and combining them with the repetitious embroidery of pornographic images, Amer has arrived at a more openly pronounced criticism of (stereotypically) male artistic behavior. With Abstract Expressionism as the common point of reference for heroic artistic gestures and the sexist visualness of pornographic magazines as the definitive example of the male gaze, Amer has isolated two dominant strands in popular visual culture. By combining these with the subtle textuality of her intertwined threads, colored blotches and soft objects, Amer manages to continue her quiet critique of the stereotypes of domesticity, femininity, and sexuality, while simultaneously embracing the contested imagery. The slightly disconcerting feeling of unrest that often comes with her work thus can be seen as proof of the constant rejection of simple visual or thematic solutions to the questions Amer’s work has been asking for over a decade."

For more on Ghada Amer's art from a Lacanian point of view, read here.

Also here from Art Journal (thanks kb)

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