Ghada Amer - Ceramics

Ghada Amer (b. Cairo, 1963; lives and works in New York) rose to renown in the mid-1990s with depictions of erotic motifs she stitched onto her paintings. These works compellingly interwove an ironic take on traditional role models with a confident reimagination of the painterly medium by combining it with embroidery. In 2014, the artist turned to working with clay, initially using it to produce models for her steel sculptures, then developing increasingly impromptu shapes. After making abstract colorful clay sculptures that stand out for their coarse-grained contours, she was awarded a two-year residency at the Greenwich House Pottery in New York, where she created works that are without parallel in the worlds of fine art or ceramics. Amer starts out with large-format thin slabs of clay that are extraordinarily difficult to handle, painting women’s portraits on both sides and then bending the slabs and standing them on edge.

This book presents numerous works from both series of ceramics as well as documentary photographs showing the artist at work in the studio. With two essays by Justine Ludwig and Britta Schmitz and a conversation between Sebastian Preuss and Ghada Amer.