Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thoughts
1 May - 14 June 2025
Marianne Boesky Gallery
507 West 24th Street

Marianne Boesky is pleased to present Disobedient Thoughts, an exhibition of new work by Ghada Amer (b. 1963 in Cairo, Egypt) that features a new suite of embroidery paintings as well as a series of experimental sculptures.

Often appropriating sexualized imagery sourced from pornographic magazines, Amer subverts the masculine tropes that permeate them, depicting women in moments of ecstasy, pleasure, and tenderness. For her embroidery paintings – a vein of her practice that she has been honing since the early 1990s – Amer embroiders on canvas these often-sourced-from-porn women's faces, then in the canvas voids creates abstract compositions with excess thread that often allude to the work of famous male painters. 

For the sculptural works in the show, Amer presents an experimental series called Thoughts. The abstract ceramic works (some of which are scaled up then cast in bronze and steel) are made with her non-dominant hand out of clay scraps from her painted ceramic slab works. Amer sculpts the clay scraps according to instinct and intuition, furthering her practice's overall material considerations.

Disobedient Thoughts will be on view alongside the U.S. debut of Brazilian painter Thalita Hamaoui in Marianne Boesky’s adjacent space at 509 West 24th Street (press kit linked here).

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition, with the credit line “copyright of the artist and courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery”