Ghada Amer | QR CODES REVISITED—NEW YORK

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present a series of new works by Ghada Amer (b. 1963; Cairo, Egypt) entitled QR CODES REVISITED—NEW YORK. Rethinking a textile appliqué tradition long associated with male tentmakers in Egypt, Amer masterfully pulls at the threads of cultural dualities—feminine and masculine, craft and art, abstraction and figuration, East and West—with sensitivity and specificity. 

In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, ceramic, garden, and installation, Amer appropriates sexualized imagery, often from pornographic magazines, and she subverts the masculinist tropes that permeate them. She reimagines women in moments of ecstasy, pleasure, and tenderness, assuming henceforth the role of painter and sculptor in the feminine.

In her newest body of work, Amer takes on a traditional Egyptian textile craft in which richly colored appliqué panels were used to decorate the interiors of tents and pavilions and transforms them into abstract grids of monochromatic, geometric patterns, reminiscent of the ubiquitous form of QR codes. And yet, within the seemingly-abstract surfaces, Amer has in fact embedded feminist texts—some English, some Arabic, all using stylized, abstracted characters.

Amer frequently incorporates language into her work, often borrowing pithy aphorisms from other feminist activists, artists, and writers. She has a similar approach in this body of works. While in one of her newest works of QR CODES REVISITED—NEW YORK, she incorporates the Arabic sentence "a woman's voice is revolution," in others, she quotes longer excerpts from Australian historian Joyce Stevens, Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, and Tunisian activist Amina Sboui. Embedding these texts within her work, Amer once again refutes the objectification of women—instead deploying the voices of feminist activists from around the world to reclaim agency for women everywhere.

Marianne Boesky Gallery's presentation of Amer's work coincides with exhibitions of the artists' work at Tina Kim Gallery in New York, Goodman Gallery in London, and Kewenig in partnership with Ana Serratosa Gallery in Valencia, Spain this fall.

ABOUT GHADA AMER

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. Among invitations 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—she was given a mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008 and a larger, more extensive one across three major museums in Marseille (France) in December 2022. Amer studied at the Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice, France, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, and the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. She lives and works in New York.