Ghada Amer's (b. 1963; Cairo, Egypt) expansive, ambitious practice is a perpetual pursuit of new forms and methods of expression. Working across painting, sculpture, ceramic, and garden installation, Amer appropriates and reinterprets the predominantly masculine tropes of Western art history. Stridently, straightforwardly political in her approach, Amer reimagines the feminized materials and subjects of such histories in order to insert herself into the canon.
Amer's work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. She was recognized with a mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008 and a larger, more extensive one at the MUCEM and across other venues in Marseille, France in 2022. A solo exhibition, the first to focus on Amer’s sculptural work, is set to open in the fall of 2026 at the Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. She is regularly invited to prestigious group shows and biennials-such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007. In 2024, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Amer the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters. Amer studied at the Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice, France, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, and at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. She lives and works in New York.