Ghada Amer

Kewenig Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of Ghada Amer (*1963 in Cairo, lives and works in New York) in its Berlin gallery.

Internationally known for her embroidered canvases, Ghada Amer focused in the last years on creating works out of clay. At the tradition-steeped Greenwich House Pottery she discovered her love for the material: “Clay is a goddess,” she says, “because she is finicky.” On thin panels, Amer paints with liquefied colored clay or folds them into abstract, colorful sculptures. The exhibition shows the scope of the Amer’s work by bringing together her ceramics with a selection of her recent canvases, a steel sculpture and a number of works on paper that are the result of her collaboration with Iranian artist Reza Farkhondeh. Irrespective of the medium, all of Amer’s works share her distinct style and concern. Questioning relationships of power by expressing archetypes of gender and sexual representations are always at her work’s heart. With her images of self-confident, tantalizing women Amer opposes the criminalization of the female body in cultural traditions and religious fundamentalism.