GHADA AMER
ARGENTUM COLLECTION, 2025
Ghada Amer Flower Vase
She designed an artistic vase with an irregular form,crafted in metal and enriched with a textured surface where polishing is used to reveal subtle highlights and shadows. True to her sculptural approach, she soughtto preserve the lightness and feminine sensualitythat define her work — forms that intertwine and seem to flow with natural grace. In this piece, her characteristic sensual figures emerge through thechiseling technique, delicately engraved onto the metal surface, as if coming to life and rising from within the vase itself.
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GHADA AMER
Ghada Amer is an internationally recognized artist with a vast range of works that include not only painting, but also bronze sculptures, clay ceramics, prints, installations, videos, and outdoor gardens.
Her expansive, ambitious practice is a perpetual pursuit of new forms and methods of expression. Working across painting, sculpture, ceramic, and garden installation, Amer appropriates and reinterprets the predominantly masculine tropes of Western art history. Stridently, straightforwardly political in her approach, Amer reimagines the feminized materials and subjects of such histories in order to insert herself into the canon.
Amer was born in Cairo and moved to Nice, France when she was eleven years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989), during which she also studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1991 she moved to Paris to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996 for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.
Amer’s work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. She was recognized with a mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008 and a larger, more extensive one at the MUCEM and across other venues in Marseille, France in 2022. She is regularly invited to prestigious shows and biennials-such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007. In 2024, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Amer the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters.
Upcoming projects include a solo show, the first to focus on Amer’s sculptural work, in September 2026 at the Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
“It is while in art school that I realized that the history of art and of painting especially was almost exclusively dominated by men. And it is this realization that led me to embroider and to paint with thread. I am a painter above all. Thread and needles are my brush.”