Artist Ghada Amer, whose work will be on display next week in Frieze Seoul at the Tina Kim Gallery booth, is hardly the first artist to get angry — or channel that feeling into her work. Few artists talk about it so openly and even cheerfully.
“My paintings are angry,” says Ms Amer, 60, referring to her embroidered works that depict women.
During a lively conversation in the large multi-story studio in New York’s Harlem neighborhood that she shares with her partner, artist Reza Farkhondeh, she explained that the emotion dates back to 1986, when a teacher at her French art school wouldn’t let her participate. to a painting class. “He didn’t want to teach women,” she said.
Her anger also has other fuel. “I have not been collected as much as white artists,” Ms. Amer added. She was born in Egypt and is a national of that country, as well as of the United States and France.
“I don’t understand why,” she added. ‘But I am also a woman who makes art about women. It’s frustrating.”
But instead of cursing her bad luck, she threw her head back and laughed. The phrase “happy warrior,” commonly applied to politicians, seems to apply to Mrs. Amer as well.
The embroidery in her signature works on canvas – which have an underlying drawn or painted element – gives her the quality of a relief. “I wanted to paint with thread,” she said of her first forays into the medium.
The threads seem to weep from the eyes of some of her female figures, and the embroidery alludes to the idea of sewing as a woman’s work, highlighting the gender dynamics in art history.
Sometimes the works depict sexual situations, with references to pornography. Ms. Amer has a sense of humor: she called a 2005 embroidered work featuring nude women “Knotty but Nice.”
Over the past twelve years she has also become increasingly involved in new media, making sculptures in ceramics and, most recently, in bronze.
“I’m very excited about this oeuvre,” she said especially about the bronze statues, one of which will be on Tina Kim’s stand next week.
That sculpture, ‘The Red Portrait’ (2023), a tabletop-sized bronze that Mrs. Amer made that resembles a panel screen, depicts a female face in the manner of her paintings; the stand will also feature “Another Revolutionary Woman” (2022) and other embroidered works.
In October, Ms. Kim will hold a New York gallery show dedicated to Ms. Amer and will also exhibit her work at the Frieze London fair that month.
“Tina really encouraged me at the bronze. It opened a door,” Ms. Amer said of working with her dealer. (She is also represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery).
She added that unlike the anger-fuelled paintings, “the sculptures are more lyrical.”
Her work is now also on display closer to her home in New York: One of Mrs. Amer’s thread paintings, “Heather’s Dégradé” (2006), is featured in the Brooklyn Museum’s controversial exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” a sharply critical look at the artist’s intricate legacy, curated in part by the comedian and writer.
New York-based collector Miyoung Lee, curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, owns two paintings by Mrs. Amer and has his eye on a garden installation by the artist.
She said she was surprised Ms. Amer wasn’t a bigger name in the art world. “She’s one of the most underrated OGs out there,” Ms. Lee said. “She’s ahead of her time.”
That sentiment was echoed by Melissa Chiu, the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The Hirshhorn showed a piece by Ms Amer in 2013, and another project is in the works for the future, Ms Chiu said.
“She introduced gender and politics into her practice early on,” Ms. Chiu said. “She’s more relevant now than ever.”
Mrs. Amer was born in Cairo and lived there until she was eleven when her family moved to France. “I grew up in the West,” she said, noting that she gets frustrated when people emphasize her Muslim heritage. “Sometimes I feel French,” she added.
After her daunting time at art school there, she decided to move to the United States, which she did in 1995. But she said her frankly sexual works met with some resistance in all of her home countries.
“People were shocked by this,” she said of the way viewers reacted to her more explicit New York gallery works in the late 1990s. “Just like the Muslim culture I left behind.”
She added, “Sometimes I think I have nowhere to go.”
Her first solo exhibition at a gallery was a flop, with no sales, but the second sold out, she said, and she had launched her career, working with a succession of leading dealers, including Gagosian.
Her work with textiles was unusual at the time. “She anticipated the idea of returning to materiality,” said Michelle Grabner, an artist and longtime professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who follows Ms. Amer’s work. “We are now completely there, now that fibers and textiles have made a comeback.”
Now that she has turned some of her attention to bronzes, Mrs. Amer must manage a complicated process consisting of many stages: a drawing on cardboard that is converted into a stencil model and then a clay model. Molten bronze is later poured into a wax-filled resin or rubber mold, creating the finished piece using the so-called lost-wax process.
The high cost of manufacturing the sculptures forced her to move the final stage of the process to a foundry in Seoul, where she traveled to work on it last year.
“The sculpture isn’t selling very well so far,” Ms. Amer acknowledged – but the same was true of her paintings 25 years ago.
But the pleasure she derives from making truly three-dimensional works makes her think she’s on the right track. “This is the future,” she said of the bronze statues.
Ms Amer added that now that I’ve reached the 60-year mark, “I think I’m doing my best. I’m done proving myself.”
