Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn
718-638-5000
Ghada Amer: Love Has No End
February 16-October 19, 2008

Ghada Amer: Love Has No End, the first major U.S. retrospective of the renowned artist's work, features some 50 pieces from every aspect of Amer's career as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, performer, garden designer, and installation artist. These include the iconic Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie (1995), The Reign of Terror (2005), and Big Black Kansas City Painting (2005), as well as a generous selection of works never before exhibited in this country.

While she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition for her abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose entire body of work is infused with the same ideological and aesthetic concerns. The submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her art.

Organized in a chronological and thematic manner that reflects the stages of Amer's career over the past two decades, Love Has No End commences with her earliest sketchbooks that illustrate the genesis of her ideas about patterning and embroidery. The exhibition continues with a series of works from the artist's early "domestic series," followed by works examining fairy tales and other clichés about gender. In addition to the more iconic erotic paintings for which she is most famous, numerous works devoted to world politics are exhibited, including some of her more recent antiwar pieces.

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1963, and moved to France at age 11. She earned a B.F.A. in 1986 and an M.F.A. in 1989 from École Pilote Internationale d'Art et de Recherche, Villa Arson, Nice, France. She now lives and works in New York City. These relocations are reflected in Amer's work. Her painting is influenced by the idea of shifting meanings and the appropriation of the languages of abstraction and expressionism. Her prints, drawings, and sculptures question clichéd roles imposed on women; her garden projects connect embroidery and gardening as specifically "feminine" activities; and her recent installations address the current tumultuous political climate. Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing and Western models of behavior, Amer's work addresses universal problems, such as the oppression of women, which are prevalent in all cultures.

Viewing Amer's hand-embroidered paintings, with their delicate traceries of stray threads, involves a visual shift, as what appears to be a mass of abstract lines gradually comes into focus as highly erotic figures, displayed in a repetitive pattern. The work refuses to bow to the puritanical elements of both Western and Islamic culture, and what could be called "institutionalized feminism," with its own persistent myth of feminine virtue.

Curator Valerie Cassel, one of the six-person team to select Ms. Amer for the Whitney Biennial 2000, says in a recent New York Times review of Amer's work that Amer subdues and overpowers the male-dominated language of Abstract Expression by sewing on top of it. Amer's embroidery of nude female images taken from pornographic magazines has a similar overpowering effect. According to Cassel:

"When we see those images in her paintings, we feel as if we've accidentally walked into a woman's boudoir, where she's pleasuring herself, rather than looking at something primarily designed and distributed for a male eye."

A visit to her parents in Cairo in 1988 provided Ghada Amer with artistic inspiration. She saw how the veil had been pervasively adopted and how in fashion magazines Egyptian veils were superimposed on Western fashions. Today Amer continues to work with themes of intersecting cultures and the women's position in all cultures.

"What is going on now politically is like a mirror of what has always gone on in myself, because I am a hybrid of the West and the East," said Ms. Amer in a New York Times interview with Hilarie Sheets published November 25, 2001. "It's a clash between civilizations that of course don't understand each other. I've lived with these contradictions all my life." She does not want her artwork to be seen as art of "the other" just because she is from a Muslim background. Her work has aspects of Islamic influence, such as use of text or passages from the Quran, but it is mostly concerned with women in a universal context.

Amer also creates embroidered three dimensional work. One such piece, entitled Private Rooms (1998-99), was on view at the PS1 show Greater New York in 1999. The title is taken from the Quran that speaks about the Prophet's home, where he had a private room for each wife. The embroidered sculpture, made of soft colored satin reminiscent of a bride's bed used in Arabic cultures, is composed of three repeated elements: a shelf, a shoe compartment, and a dress holder. The embroidered text is a French translation of the Quran that speak about women. She chose to use a French translation rather than Arabic because anything from the Quran written in Arabic is considered sacred, and she wanted to remove it from that context as well as be respectful of Islam. The language choice provides the work with another layer for English speaking viewers, reinforcing that even in translation, there is a cultural divide that keeps non-Muslim Americans from understanding Islam. It also relates to the way that text is seen in a mosque, where you can't read all the words on the wall, but see the beauty of them.

Despite her respect toward Islam shown in her work, and the fact that she is inspired by Islamic aesthetic and verse, Ghada Amer is not always well received by Islamic communities. Many Muslims critique her work as being too suggestive for proper Islamic art, and feel that her work is more largely influenced by her Western education. Her parents, who are strictly religious, have had a hard time getting used to the fact that she is a controversial artist. Ghada Amer has recently been featured in the 1999 Venice Biennale and the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Amer's work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Deitch Projects, New York; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the 2000 Whitney Biennial, New York; P.S. 1, New York; the 2000 Kwangju Biennial, South Korea; SITE Sante Fe, NM; the 1999 Venice Biennale; the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale; and Gagosian Gallery, London.

Ghada Amer: Love Has No End is organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Maura Reilly, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. A variety of education programs will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition. For information, visit www.brooklynmuseum.org

Ghada Amer (Egypt, b. 1963), Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie, 1995-2004, Embroidery on cotton, (Each): 70 7/8 x 27 9/16 x 4 in. (180 x 70 x 10.2 cm), Courtesy of the artist.

Ghada Amer (Egypt, b. 1963), Snow White’s Stepmothers (from Breathe into Me series), 2005, Embroidery and ink on paper, (Framed): 28 1/2 x 22 in. (72.4 x 55.9 cm), Courtesy of the artist.

Ghada Amer (Egypt, b. 1963), La Femme qui Repasse, 1996, Acrylic and embroidery on canvas,33 1/2 x 39 3/8 in. (85.1 x 100.1 cm), Courtesy of the artist.