Ghada Amer

Cheim & Read

New York, 547 West 25 Street 

Many of Amer’s paintings make art historical references in subversive and humorous ways. White Girls and White-RFGA subtly makes racial commentary, critiquing whiteness as a convention while addressing Robert Ryman. Landscape with Black Mountains-RFGA conflates the female form as a pastoral setting. The cascading and pooling thread, omnipresent in Amer’s work, recalls Jackson Pollock. Sorkin writes in the catalogue essay, “Ghada Amer has utilized the lush landscape of the art historical past from which to plunder—re-casting the role of women as subject, versus object.”

Ghada Amer, MA VENUS DE MILO 2017, Glazed ceramic

The last few years have been a very fertile time for Amer. This exhibition will present, for the first time in depth, the artist’s recent foray into ceramics. Amer’s signature style of contoured figures appears in the rough ceramic forms, but instead of being partially obscured by dense thread, the figures are rendered by bleeding colored slips into the earthenware form. Her intense engagement with the material conditions of ceramics to depict painterly concerns is apparent. 

“Adam Welch, director of Greenwich House Pottery, has said, “Though these works fit within a continuation of the ceramic figurative tradition, she defies convention, converting her clay canvases into three-dimensional form. Many artists currently converging on the medium generally do so in a manner distinct from their other art practice. Ghada set out to close the distance across her mediums.””

On view through May 12, 2018