GHADA AMER

Early years and Background

Amer was born in Cairo in 1963 and spent part of her childhood in Libya and France before settling in Paris as a teenager. She later moved to the United States and lives and works in New York, maintaining close links with studios and galleries in Europe and the Middle East.

Amer studied painting at Villa Arson, École nationale supérieure d’art, Nice, completing a BFA in 1986 and an MFA in 1989, and attended the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris. Training in European modernist traditions while coming from an Egyptian background shaped her sensitivity to cultural translation, censorship, and the gendered expectations attached to both images and textile labour.

Ghada Amer Artworks

Ghada Amer’s artworks use embroidery, painting, ceramics, and garden design to reframe erotic imagery and everyday femininity through a female, often transnational, perspective. Amer’s practice pushes so-called ‘women’s work’ such as sewing into the centre of contemporary art, treating thread as a primary drawing and painting medium rather than a decorative supplement.

Embroidered paintings and thread

Amer is best known for large canvases in which she layers embroidered line drawings of women—often adapted from pornographic magazines—over fields of acrylic colour, allowing loose threads to knot and drip across the surface. Works such as Cinq femmes au travail (1991) and The Turkish Bath (2006) recast domestic scenes and art-historical nudes through redrawn, stitched figures that oscillate between legibility and abstraction.

In series such as Nympheas and New Albers, Amer ‘covers’ or reworks canonical references to Monet, Ingres, and geometric abstraction, inserting feminine bodies and tangled threads into genres historically dominated by male painters. The accumulation of over-sewn lines and hanging strands suggests both the repetition of domestic labour and the excess associated with desire.

Sculpture, ceramics, and gardens

Beyond canvas, Amer creates steel, bronze, and ceramic sculptures that translate her drawn and stitched lines into three dimensions, often featuring fragmented female figures or text. Her ceramics explore painting with coloured slip and clay on tiles and folded forms, extending her interest in surface, touch, and ornament into sculptural objects.

Amer’s garden works, including the evolving ‘Women’s Qualities’ series and text-based plantings such as My Body, My Choice at Goodman Gallery in London, spell out charged phrases using flowering plants and hedges. These landscape artworks use botanical form and public space to stage debates about women’s rights, identity, and social labelling.

Themes: sexuality, feminism, and identity

Across media, Amer’s work repositions erotic imagery from a patriarchal gaze to a female-authored, self-conscious register, foregrounding women’s agency and pleasure. She addresses postcolonial and diasporic identity by working between Arabic, French, and English contexts, considering how different societies surveil and script women’s bodies.

Amer’s use of embroidery directly engages with the history of textiles as a gendered craft, turning it into a vehicle for monumental contemporary art and feminist commentary. Her practice participates in broader conversations about contemporary art, challenging the boundaries between painting and craft, figuration and abstraction, and private intimacy and public display.

Select Public Commission

• Women’s Qualities (various iterations), outdoor text-and-flower installations developed for sites including the Rockefeller Center, New York, and Sunnylands Center and Gardens, California
• Text-based garden installation My Body, My Choice, Goodman Gallery, London, integrating sculptural letters and planting design.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres), French Ministry of Culture
• UNESCO Prize, 48th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice
• Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York
• Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Washington, D.C.

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Ghada Amer Exhibitions

Ghada Amer has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries. Below is a selection of important exhibitions. To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Ghada Amer follow her on Ocula. You can also view her exhibitions on Ocula here.​

Select solo exhibitions

• Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thoughts, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, USA, 2025
• You Are What You Seek, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, 2025
• Playing with Mud, Kewenig, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 2024
• Paravent Girls, Tina Kim Gallery, New York, USA, 2023
• Ghada Amer: East and West; Bitches and Witches; Sculpture (retrospective across three venues), MUCEM (Fort Saint-Jean), FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, and La Vieille Charité, Marseille, France, 2022–2023
• My Body, My Choice, Goodman Gallery, London, UK, 2022
• In Black and White, Goodman Gallery, London, UK, 2021
• Portraits of the Women I Know, Part II, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, USA, 2021

Select group exhibitions

• A Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA, 2024–2025
• Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican Centre, London, UK; touring exhibition including Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat, Morocco, 2024
• The Infinite Woman, Villa Carmignac, Hyères (Porquerolles), France, 2024
• Visionary: Viewpoints on Africa’s Arts, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, USA, 2017
• Third Space: Shifting Conversations about Contemporary Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, USA, 2017
• Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, 2006
• Against Exclusion, 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia, 2009
• APERTO Over All, 48th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 1999

Ghada Amer FAQs

Ocula | 2025