The Little Girl
2001
The work is displayed as part of the permanent exhibition
Painting
Acrylic, embroidery on canvas
132.5 × 127 × 4 cm
Presented as part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift
Ghada Amer (1963, Cairo, Egypt) is an example of an artist who emerged in the intercultural landscape of the 1990s, when marginalised non-western narratives and artists who were active outside the mainstream western art centres began to make their appearance. Amer forged her own painting language, where colour and brush gave way to needle and thread. The shift to embroidery, as a quintessential female handicraft practice, aims to differentiate her from the tradition of the male-dominated medium of brush painting. As early as the 1970s, traditional female practices had transformed into emancipatory tools in the hands of artists such as Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago. As Amer notes, “Ι refused traditional art by replacing it, or even opposing it, with a traditionally female medium in order to make sure that representation originated from a female perspective”. Embroidery, therefore, becomes a tool for undermining and contesting gender stereotypes through an attempt to restore the visibility of subjects excluded due to dominant narratives and silencing within Art History.
The work The Little Girl (2001) belongs to a broader corpus of compositions where the representation of women is based on photographs taken from pornographic material. Ghada Amer isolates the female figures, removing men and presenting them in moments of sexual stimulation. Then, she creates drawings by tracing only their outlines with a thread. Through their repetition and layering, these images acquire the character of an iconographic pattern that develops across the canvas, so that all details are rendered non-discernible. The work is the product of a double appropriation: on the one hand, of the medium of embroidery, and on the other hand, of an erotic iconography that is primarily addressed to the satisfaction of a male gaze. Regardless of the source from which she draws the material – fashion magazines, pornography, children's tales, the Koran, and mediaeval Arabic manuscripts – Amer's works attempt to critically challenge hierarchies and stereotypical portrayals of women, where the expression of desire functions as a means of empowerment.
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo and lives and works in New York. She has participated in preeminent exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, and more. Her works have been acquired by collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Arkansas, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Leeum, Samsung Museum in Seoul, among others. In 2022, Ghada Amer: A Woman’s Voice is Revolution was organized by the Mucem (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations) in partnership with the Museums of Marseille-Centre de la Vieille Charité and the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in France, marking the first major career retrospective of Ghada Amer in France. In 1997, she was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and, in 1999, the UNESCO prize at the Venice Biennale.