Untitled ,
Provenance : Acquired directly from the artistSale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, 10 November 2005, Lot 307Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
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Notes : Executed circa 1995.Ghada Amer's oeuvre challenges socialized ideas of women, particularly in relation to the taboo subjects of sex and female sexual desire. Amer's embroidered paintings deal with the puritanical legacy of women being treated as objects of male lust and voyeurism, both in reality and in art, rather than as subjects with their own desires. Ghada Amer's stitched works often appear, at first hand, to be an incomprehensible and entangled web of threads that make up emotionally disturbed, and roughly executed abstract expressionist paintings. Upon closer inspection, this seemingly masculine mess of string reveals itself to be carefully depicted and delicately embroidered, highly erotic images of women engaged in sexual acts, often times immersed in pleasuring themselves. As such, Ghada Amer plays a clever game. She usurps the traditional craft of the domesticated female, using it to brazenly portray women absorbed in acts that are considered unfeminine, thereby challenging society's dictates on the necessity of innocence. In fact, Amer's work fully acknowledges, embraces, and celebrates female sexuality. The intimate scenes that Amer embroiders over and over again across her canvases, have been appropriated from representations of women circulated and popularized by the pornography industry. These images have been largely lifted from adult magazines; they are of pictures designed for a male gaze in a genre that is intended, mainly, to be exclusive to men, and are the latest products of the continued, systematic treatment of women as sexual objects. Through her employment of images from pornography, Amer sabotages this genre and its methodical depiction of women as items, more so than agents. In doing so, Amer boldly reclaims the domain of pleasure-seeking for her gender. In Untitled (1995), a large expanse of a delicately patterned, sky-blue fabric seems to be decorated at the borders with a chaotic dripping of yellow, pink, purple, and olive green paint or to have been torn and poorly mended with rags. Up-close, the picture changes. The paint drippings, which reveal themselves to be twisted threads, take on the form of floral twirls. When further studied, these twirls bloom into breasts, a curly mess of hair, and the outline of a woman's naked body. Mouth agape, the woman is pleasuring herself. This intimate portrait of sorts is repeatedly threaded over and over in a number of directions creating the deceptively box-like pattern that roughly adorns the canvas's edges. Some stray strings slightly obscure the scene from view and take away from the instant shock factor of the work.
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