Grey Iman

Executed in 2001, Gney Iman appears to be an abstract painting-- the streaks against the white surface are reminiscent of Action Painting. Yet this is a trap, with hidden images and hidden messages. For below the seemingly random streaks are the tracery-like images of women in an array of erotic poses, obscured by this apparently haphazard veil. In this way, Gney Iman cuts to the heart of Ghada Amer's complex assault on assumptions about women, especially in the stricter parts of the Muslim world in which she was originally raised. Discussing her journeys to Egypt, which she has found has become increasingly conservative in the years since she left, she commented that, 'When I go home, I feel so conscious of my body, every time, conscious of the relationship to the body of everything I wear. Everything is so hidden that if you have a finger out, it becomes the focus of sexuality.' She rebels at this constraint, and her pictures are 'a vengeance against this' (Amer, quoted in L. Auricchio, 'Works in translation: Ghada Amer's hybrid pleasures - needlework art pieces', Art Journal, Winter 2001). In Gney Iman, this is taken to a new extreme, her revenge takes the form of a revelation, with the bodies of the women looming into focus from behind their enforced concealment.

These sexualised figures frolic behind the camouflage of the surface, for in Amer's work even the medium forms a part of the message, for she has taken needlework-- a traditionally feminine occupation-- and has subverted it, smuggling images of sexual celebration into a work created in a technique that itself speaks of oppression and overly restrictive gender roles. At the same time, Amer manages to cock a snook at the machismo associated with the Action Painters, superficially aping the appearance of their paintings yet deflating the manliness by doing so through needlework and by presenting the viewer with pornographic images rather then the self-expressive abstraction of Pollock or de Kooning.