Reinventing The Painted Veil

Artist Ghada Amer had not seen a drawing of the human figure until she was 11 years old. But Ms. Amer, a Muslim born in Cairo, Egypt, quickly made up for lost time, studying life drawing with a passionate commitment to the female form at the École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche in Nice after her family moved to France.Today, the results of Ms. Amer’s efforts are on vivid display at the Brooklyn Museum, where the artist is enjoying her first major retrospective in America, “Ghada Amer: Love Has No End.”Ms. Amer has been the subject of several solo exhibitions in America, Europe, and Israel, as well as a participant in the Venice and Whitney biennials. Her sensuous paintings, patterned with delicate embroidery, juxtapose the ideals of high art against the realities of women’s work. “I was looking for a medium,” Ms. Amer explained, “that was associated with women, but could produce painterly effects.” The artist remembers herself as a young Muslim art student who, though sheltered, did not hesitate to challenge the dictates of her teachers or enlist her art-making as a means of rebelling against her restrictive upbringing. When a male professor failed her in his painting class, she began to experiment with the medium of thread.The works on view at the Brooklyn Museum, which included Ms. Amer in its 2007 blockbuster survey, “Global Feminisms,” range from her first forays into the use of thread as a painterly medium to her more recent politically charged paintings. Also included are Ms. Amer’s works on paper and photographs of her performance pieces and installations. “Red Diagonales,” on loan from Yoko Ono, exemplifies Ms. Amer’s particular talents for transforming the visual pleasures of fine art into a titillating peep show. Broad brushes of black and red acrylic paint cascade down the canvas, while long-tangled strands of brightly colored threads partially obscure the hand-stitched outlines of nubile young women. “It’s very much about myself — this work,” Ms. Amer said. “I first began making these embroidered pictures because I wanted to learn about sex,” she said, laughing. “My interest may have been related to my Muslim background, but I could have been Christian or Jewish. Everybody has problems with their sexuality.”Critics tend to interpret Ms. Amer’s cross-disciplinary approach as a power struggle pitting the masculine muscularity of abstract painting against the feminine wiles of embroidery. But Ms. Amer admires the grand gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionists such as Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock and views the unpredictability of the painting process as a necessary complement to the linear precision of embroidery. “Painting, for me, is expressionist,” she said. “It’s a moment. You don’t know when it will end. It’s not something you think about. It’s just that you are upset, happy, or whatever you are. You have a very strong feeling and you go with this. It’s messy and undefined. The thread is the total opposite of the paint. It’s extremely structured and meticulous and repetitive. I like the tension between the two mediums.”Early in her career, Ms. Amer deployed thread as a means of accentuating the subjugated roles of women in society, depicting everything from porn stars to Disney princesses and demure housewives. But during her frequent returns to Egypt to see her family, both during and after her schooling, her attention shifted to the rising influence of religious fundamentalism and its encroaching influence on her own family. Ms. Amer was baffled that some of her closest female relatives, educated women like herself, would choose to veil themselves. “Every time I returned, I noticed more and more veiled women. I felt that something was going wrong, and it was very scary,” she recalled. The activity of her loosely hanging threads and the relentless drips of paint took on new critical significance. What was once a playful boudoir game of hide-and-seek became something more menacing with overtones of captivity and repression. “Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie,” one of the most powerful works in Ms. Amer’s retrospective, reflects the artist’s increasingly pessimistic attitude. Ms. Amer repeatedly embroidered the childish refrain onto the stiff canvas surfaces of two full-body straitjackets, one female and one male, transforming the two archetypes of heterosexual bonding into a scene of human bondage.Text has taken a pivotal role in Ms. Amer’s most recent work. For her “The Definition of the Word…” series, Ms. Amer embroidered four square canvases with the Arabic words for “security,” “love,” “peace,” and “freedom.” “I wanted to make sure for myself that they still existed in my mother tongue,” Ms. Amer said. Like her earlier paintings, long strands of embroidery threads hang loosely over the stretched canvas, forcing the viewer to seek out the text and contemplate the possible meaning of the antique calligraphic forms.But despite the politically provocative nature of some of her more recent work, Ms. Amer insists that the identity politics that preoccupy the art world were never a motivating factor for her. “I am a painter,” she said simply. Yet she acknowledges that her desire to transcend her social status as an Arab woman in the Western world is, like the threads she sews into her canvases, inextricably woven into the fabric of her art.

Reinventing The Painted Veil

Reinventing The Painted Veil

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