Curator: Adam Welch
This solo exhibition marks the culmination of Ghada Amer’s three-year Anne Reeves Artist Residency at the Arts Council of Princeton (2024-2026), generously supported by Timothy M. Andrews. The residency extends a decade of sustained experimentation in which Ghada Amer has continually expanded the material and conceptual parameters of her practice, moving between painting, sculpture, and ceramics to explore the generative possibilities of form, surface, gesture, and process.
Over the course of the residency, Ghada Amer’s sustained engagement with ceramics has led to an increasingly nuanced command of the medium and opened new possibilities within her broader artistic language. Rather than treating clay as a departure from painting, she approaches it as a site of continuity and transformation, translating painterly gestures into volume, relief, and abstract forms. In this process, the distinctions between image and object, surface and structure, and art and craft become deliberately unstable.
The works emerge from a productive tension between intention and contingency, gesture and material, control and chance. Amer’s ceramic practice foregrounds the physicality of making while simultaneously questioning the hierarchies that have historically separated painting from craft. Her vessels, wall works, vases, and abstract compositions function not simply as experiments in a new medium, but as an expanded field in which the languages of painting and ceramics intersect, overlap, and transform one another.
On view are Amer’s most recent works, including ceramic wall plates, vessels, vases, and newly developed abstract works (regulated Thoughts series). Together, they offer a view into an evolving practice in which material experimentation becomes a means of rethinking both the possibilities of painting and the status of the ceramic object.
