Ghada Amer

November 21, 2016 – March 17, 2017

Egyptian painter and sculptor, Ghada Amer, is our next artist in residence. Amer is a one-time Pollock-Krasner grant recipient who established the parameters of her residency in preparation for her upcoming solo exhibition at both the Jane Hartsook Gallery and Cheim & Reid. Much of Amer’s work deals with the gender and sexuality of women, reflected in her representation of female nudes in art history as ideal objects rather than as human beings endowed with sexuality and eroticism. She first and foremost addresses the ambiguous, transitory nature of the paradox that arises when searching for concrete definitions of east and west, feminine and masculine, art and craft. Through her paintings, sculptures and public garden projects, Amer is said to take traditional notions of cultural identity, abstraction and religious fundamentalism and turn them on their heads.

Amer was born in 1963 in Cairo, Egypt and emigrated at age 11 to France where she began her artistic training at Villa Arson in Nice. She now lives and works in New York City, where she is represented by Cheim & Reid Gallery and has had her work presented in numerous solo and group local exhibitions at Cheim & Reid, Deitch Projects, the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art among several others. Internationally, she has shown her work widely, including at Biennales in Venice and Sydney.