BY PAUL LASTER
(Excerpt from the full article below)
6. Ghada Amer at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen
Since she first emerged as a fast-rising artist in 1990, Ghada Amer has filtered her work through her own life experiences as an Egyptian woman brought up by Muslim parents in France. This background accounts for her particular take on feminism: a fearless mix of politics, pornography, Arabic tradition, and Western liberalism, which became most notable in her signature stitched-canvas “paintings” of women in moments of ecstasy. Working more recently with ceramics, Amer created freestanding slab plates, which she figuratively drew upon from both sides. This led to the use of cardboard boxes to make maquettes for a series of sculptural women presented like folding screens, which she then began casting in bronze.
Titled Paravent Girls, several of these two-side portraits, which turn tawdry materials and risqué subject matter into enchanting works of art, are featured in the show, paired with the New York–based artist’s whimsical word works, created with cotton appliqué on canvas and styled after QR codes. Her painting A WOMAN’S VOICE ironically alters the lettering of the Arabic proverb “A woman’s voice is shameful” to read “A woman’s voice is revolution,” while two differently designed word works appropriate a famous quote—”plastic surgery is a postmodern veil”—from Egyptian feminist activist Nawal El Saadawi to make a new, more meaningful, form of concrete poetry on canvas.
Through July 27
