Ghada Amer

The Heart, 2012

Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose body of work is anchored and informed by ongoing ideological and aesthetic concerns: the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her artistic practice.

Amer's sculptures propose different ways in which the manipulation of line, shape, and colour can yield an infinite range of compositional and design effects, even within the limitations of a globular form. The women depicted in Amer's sculptures and paintings are not victims, rather, they pose self-confidently, giving their viewers a challenging look. Nudity never makes Ghada Amer’s figures seem vulnerable or shameful, in Amer’s practice, regardless of the medium, style and political demands, her figures assert themselves. With her images of self-confident women, Amer opposes institutionalised sexism.

Starting in 2010, Ghada Amer began building what has been dubbed her “egg-shaped” sculptures, oval shaped objects with flowing crisscrossed lines that produce a play of light and shadows on the wall and floor surrounding them. They invite the viewer to gaze back and forth between the inside and outside of the object and to hypnotically contemplate the space within the sculpture.