Ghada Amer, Installation View of Ceramics, Knots, Thoughts, Scraps at Dallas Contemporary, 2018.
Courtesy Dallas Contemporary.
Photos by Kevin Todora.
Fingers hover over lips and breasts, hair cascades over and around faces, kisses are blown and shared, pleasure is given and received: Ghada Amer’s ceramic sculptures shiver with ecstatic encounter. Ceramics, Knots, Thoughts, Scraps at Dallas Contemporary (through Dec. 17) is Amer’s first exhibition devoted solely to her ceramic work, and in it we find the artist’s fierce proposition splayed across a room of clay slabs: what would it be like to live in a world in which female pleasure was seen as beautiful?
Amer describes herself as a painter, and she is perhaps best known for embroidered canvases, though her multidisciplinary work includes painting, sculpture, illustration, performance, garden design, and installation. Born in Egypt, she studied in France before moving to New York in the 1990s. This exhibition is a return to Texas for the artist: her second solo exhibition in the U.S. was at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2000, curated by Valerie Cassel-Oliver.
Ceramics, Knots, Thoughts, Scraps also includes platter-like sculptures, hung high on the wall, and a series of tables with her abstract objects, which she calls Knots, Thoughts, and Scraps. These kneaded balls and blobs of clay are titled as studies of color (Study in Silver Luster, for example), or as references to other artists (Homage a Chamberlain). Many of the portraits of women in suggestive poses are also titled as color studies: Sculpture in Black, Red, and White is a slab with two images of women on either side of it. Red, Black, and Gold Sculpture is a slab with two portraits of women’s faces shown in close up, the monochrome of the paint dripping down in long streams. What is so prominent in the exhibition—the female body and its pleasure—is nowhere named. Notably, in the exhibition title these works fall under the ambiguous Ceramics. And, perhaps that is fitting.
Writing about Amer’s show at Cheim & Reid in May, Seph Rodney suggests that Amer’s proposal might be impossible to meet, at least for now. In order to make the world Amer imagines, Rodney writes, “I suspect we need to grow toward the place where neither desire nor the body are imagined to be that which needs to be discarded.”
—LAURA AUGUST