Ghada Amer | You Are What You Seek

For over three decades, Ghada Amer has approached painting as a medium to be questioned, broadened and continually reimagined. Throughout her career her work has unfolded as a sustained effort to reconsider the way women appear in art and the way painting might foreground their presence. If the medium has historically been tied to mastery and a closed set of conventions, Amer treats it as a space that can be unraveled. Rather than reject painting, she stretches its borders through thread, sculpture and language, allowing it to evolve into a more porous and responsive form. This exhibition marks her first show at Goodman Gallery Cape Town since 'Love is a Difficult Blue' in collaboration with Reza Farkhondeh in 2018, brings together recent works in painting, embroidery, bronze and steel. Seen together, they trace a practice continually seeking new forms through which to recognise and honour the complexity of women’s lives.

Amer works not on canvas but on unfolded cardboard boxes gathered from the street. Their surface carries the trace of use, showing faint folds, seams and markings beneath the drawing. Across these textured planes, Amer renders female figures in ink with a line that is both bold and firm. The ink moves across the corrugation with easy gravity, settling into the grain and catching lightly in the ridges. The figures hold to the surface with a serene presence, neither posed nor performative. Cardboard is a material of transit, yet here it becomes a place of arrival. Once used to contain and protect, it now offers a ground that holds presence openly. Any echo of the folding screen, once used to hide the female body, is gently reversed. The box has been opened fully and without ceremony. The women remain steady and self-possessed in their own company.

From these intimate surfaces, the figure seems to exist beyond the work itself. In GIRLS IN WHITE AND GOLD, she takes her place in space with a self-assured quietness, held in bronze with a tenderness that resists monumetalisation. Bronze, often tied to permanence or public legacy, is here used to sustain a presence that feels personal rather than declarative. The sculpture invites the viewer to move around it, as if to acknowledge that presence can never be captured from a single point of view. The act of looking becomes a gentle negotiation, shaped by awareness and reciprocity.

If this sculpture holds the body in its fullness, MEXICAN THOUGHTS IN WHITE draws our attention inward, towards the movement of thought before it becomes language. Part of Amer’s evolving Thoughts series, the work carries the immediacy of forms shaped by the non-dominant hand, a way of thinking through touch akin to a visual form of automatic writing. In translating these instinctive shapes into bronze, Amer retains their original spontaneity within a lasting material. The sculpture arcs and folds with a rhythm that feels both spontaneous and composed, as though an unspoken idea has momentarily taken form. The soft white surface gives the piece a sense of clarity and reflection. It feels less like an object to interpret than a pause in thought, held gently in space.

The shift towards articulation finds form in You Are What You Seek where thought gathers into language. Here Amer shapes repeated Arabic text attributed to the poet Rumi into a spherical lattice of interwoven letters. Language becomes structure. The phrase can be read from multiple vantage points, suggesting that meaning is not fixed but influenced by how we move through it. The work reflects Amer’s understanding that transformation begins within and that both personal and artistic freedom are nurtured through reflection. It continues her engagement with translation, both cultural and linguistic, and the ways language can hold the meeting point between inner life and shared understanding. The sculpture forms a bridge between form and speech, where what was once felt begins to be voiced.

The exhibition then returns to the canvas, where language re-enters the visual field in Amer’s embroidered text works. In these paintings, the artist stitches quotations and statements related to female identity directly into the surface. Works such as Body Culture reveal how social expectations continue to shape how women see themselves and are seen by others. Amer uses embroidery to give a physical weight to language. Words are not applied to the canvas, they are worked into it with both patience and repetition. Loose strands often gather at the base, forming soft clusters that suggest the thought continues beyond the frame. Through this process, what was once dismissed as domestic labour becomes a means of authorship. Thread becomes voice. The canvas becomes a page where language is held, repeated and made tangible.