Ghada Amer | Blue Bra Girls | 2012

Egyptian artist Ghada Amer is well known for brightly-colored, embroidered “paintings” in which depictions of women, often appropriated from soft-porn magazines, are carefully stitched and sewn on the canvas. Extra thread is left to hang from the images’ contours like drips and splashes of paint, abstracting and obscuring the figures. Amer slyly pokes at the clothing restrictions imposed on women in Islamic countries, suggesting the ways in which women covertly look find ways to integrate fashion into their lives in order to express their own personal style.

Amer began her gestural paintings in art school in France to counter what she perceived as the machismo of the abstract expressionism and tachisme* of her teachers. By using the traditionally feminine, domestic activity of embroidery in a gestural manner to both decorate and obscure her figures, Amer confronts cultural objectification of the female form. Amer also refers to the fashion magazines of the Middle East, where Western fashion is modified in accordance to the more modest social mores of the region.