Exhibitions: Ghada Amer: Love Has No End

Ghada Amer (American, born Egypt, 1963). Red Diagonales, 2000. Acrylic, embroidery, and gel medium on canvas. © Ghada Amer, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Private collection

February 16–October 19, 2008

Ghada Amer: Love Has No End, the first U.S. survey of the renowned artist’s work, features some fifty pieces from every aspect of Amer’s career as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, performer, garden designer, and installation artist. These include the iconic Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie (1995/2002), The Reign of Terror (2005), and Big Black Kansas City Painting—RFGA (2005), as well as a generous selection of works never before exhibited in this country.

While she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition for her abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multimedia artist whose entire body of work is infused with the same ideological and aesthetic concerns. The submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life, the celebration of female sexuality and pleasure, the incomprehensibility of love, the foolishness of war and violence, and an overall quest for formal beauty, constitute the territory that she explores and expresses in her art. In addition to the erotic paintings for which she is most famous, numerous works devoted to world politics are exhibited, including some of her more recent antiwar pieces.

Ghada Amer: Love Has No End is organized for the Brooklyn Museum by Maura Reilly, Ph.D., Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

The exhibition is made possible by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation.