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Article

Amer, Ghada  

Chika Okeke-Agulu

(b Cairo, May 22, 1963).

American painter, sculptor, fibre and installation artist of Egyptian birth. Amer, one of the few young artists of African origin to gain prominence in the late 1990s international art scene, studied painting in France at the Villa Arson EPIAR, Nice (MFA, 1989), and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Art Plastique, Paris (1991). She subsequently moved to New York. She is best known for her canvases in which paint and embroidery are combined to explore themes of love, desire, sexuality, and women’s identity in a patriarchal world. Amer’s use of Embroidery, historically regarded as a genteel female craft, to create images of women fulfilling their sexual desires without inhibition, recalls the provocations and strategies of 1970s Western feminist art. However, her work also reflects her alarm at the incremental curbing of women’s social and political freedoms in her native Egypt following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, especially after the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser ended in ...

Article

Ashkin, Michael  

Morgan Falconer

(b Morristown, NJ, Oct 29, 1955).

American sculptor. He studied Oriental and Middle Eastern cultures and languages before later graduating in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 1993). Ashkin gained international recognition in the mid-1990s for his tabletop dioramas of inhospitable, often deserted, American landscapes. Influenced by Robert Smithson’s interest in the concept of entropy as well as more traditional landscape discourses such as Romanticism and the Sublime, Ashkin’s work has often suggested vast inhuman wastelands, although their real scale might only be a few square feet. His earliest works concentrated on semi-arid deserts, but soon the dominant motif switched to semi-stagnant marshes. No. 33 (1996; see exh. cat.), typical of the numerical nomination of his work, depicts a long, thin freeway in a swampy wilderness; a single truck drives along and telegraph wires line the road, suggesting vast distances. No. 15 (1996; see exh. cat.) is smaller in size, though again the tiny scale of the trucks that pass in convoy over a swampy, pock-marked landscape suggest great expanse. More recently Ashkin has expanded his practice into video and photography exploring the Sublime. ...

Article

Chihuly, Dale  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 20 September 1941, in Tacoma (Washington).

Glassmaker, sculptor, installation artist.

Dale Chihuly studied at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he received a BA in 1965, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1967, where he obtained an MS, and Rhode Island School of Design, where he obtained an MFA in 1968. During his period of study, he also travelled to Ireland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Sweden, Russia, and the Middle East. In 1969, he established the glass programme at the Rhode Island School of Design and, in 1971, co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle.

Chihuly first began to blow glass in 1965. A prolific artist, he is best known for his multi-part glass sculptures influenced by the designs of Native American blankets and basketry, Japanese ikebana, and Venetian art glass of the 1920s and 1930s. His series of works includes Cylinders, Baskets, Seaforms, Macchia, Persians, and Putti. In the early 1970s, he made large installation works such as ...

Article

Steinbach, Haim  

Catherine M. Grant

(b Rehovot, Palestine, Feb 25, 1944).

American sculptor and installation artist of Israeli birth. He studied for his BFA at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn between 1962 and 1968 after gaining US citizenship in 1962. Between 1971 and 1973 he studied for his MFA at Yale University, New Haven, CT. In the early 1970s he subverted the language of Minimalism in paintings, such as Brown Painting with Bars #3 (1973; see 1999 exh. cat., p. 66) by using linoleum strips instead of paint. This led to one of his first installations, Display #7 (1979; see 1999 exh. cat., pp. 74–5), for which he covered the walls of the reception room at the Artists Space, New York, with strips of wallpaper, and displayed various knick-knacks on shelves. Such presentations of everyday objects, which reference the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, continued to be a vital part of Steinbach’s practice. In 1985 the triangular shelves (hand-made and Minimalist in appearance) became a dominant motif, used to support a variety of mass-produced objects including boxes of cornflakes and other such prosaic items, often repeated (as in the Pop paintings of Andy Warhol) to emphasize the link between factory production and the commodification of art. His use of digital clocks, lava lamps and stacked saucepans in a work such as ...