Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963, she now lives and works in New York. I came across her wonderful work at the local art gallery last weekend. Viewing Amer’s hand-embroidered paintings, with their delicate traceries of stray threads, involves a visual shift, as what appears to be a mass of abstract lines gradually comes into focus as highly erotic figures, displayed in a repetitive pattern. The work refuses to bow to the puritanical elements of both Western and Islamic culture, and what could be called “institutionalised feminism” with its own persistent myth of feminine virtue. She doesn’t have her own site, but you can view some of her work here and here.