Ghada Amer
b. 1963, Egypt
For me, to defend the choice of being a painter and to use the codes of abstract painting, as they have been defined historically, is not only an artistic challenge. Its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically. I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe – that of sewing and embroidery. By hybridising those worlds, the canvas becomes a new territory where the feminine has its own place in a field dominated by men, and from where, I hope, we won’t be taken out again. In those abstract surfaces I inscribe figures of women taken from pornographic magazines, where male fantasies are represented, and in this way I do a double reappropiation.
(Text: friends + neighbours catalogue, 2000)
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