Art Basel Paris: Ghada Amer | Paravent Girls

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Marianne Boesky, Tina Kim, and Goodman Gallery are pleased to present Ghada Amer’s Paravent Girls (2021–23) for the public programs section of Art Basel Paris. The three monumental bronze sculptures—Suzy Playing (2021), Jennifer and Barbara (2022), and L’éttonement d’ Amélie (2022)—will be on view at the Domaine national du Palais-Royal. 

In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, ceramic, gardens, and installation, Ghada Amer (b. 1963; Cairo, Egypt) pulls at the threads of cultural dualities—feminine and masculine, craft and art, abstraction and figuration, East and West—with sensitivity and specificity. Appropriating sexualized imagery—often sourced from pornographic magazines—Amer subverts the masculinist tropes that permeate them, reimagining women in moments of ecstasy, pleasure, and tenderness. Centering women’s empowerment, Amer’s practice operates as a corrective to the male-dominated history of Western art. 

Beginning their lives as abandoned cardboard boxes found on the street, Amer’s Paravent Girls take a rich material journey before arriving at their final bronze form. On the surface of the flattened boxes, the artist draws the faces of anonymized women, the excess ink from her deceptively simple line drawings trailing delicately down the corrugated texture of the box’s surface. Amer transfers these tender portraits to clay, redrawing each figures’ features in relief in the soft, earthen material manipulated by hand. She then casts the sculptures in bronze; the final sculptures retain the form and memory of the cardboard boxes from which they were originally made. 

The metaphorical potential of these works is evident from their titles: the Paravent Girls exemplify Amer’s interest in notions of the gaze and the dynamics invested in the act of looking. The sculptures form paravents—screens used to separate a room, to differentiate between public and private spaces, to conceal, to withhold, to create a sense of mystery. Yet, Amer’s figures—captured here in moments of intimacy and eroticism—are revealed, perpetually, to the viewer.