Ghada Amer

of hyper-masculine painters associated with post-war modernism, including Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, and Cy Twombly.

Landscape with Black Mountains-RFGA (2017) [Plate 1] pokes fun at the conventions of pastoral nature scenes, passing off the most unnatural of pornographic poses as a voluptuous topography, densely rendered in smoky red and black contouring. The allure of this compromising position, of course, is its very earthiness. Amer conflates the swells of buttocks and the splayed legs of a nude, supine woman as terrain to conquer, the toes touching in an upside down “V” shape, perfectly framing her labia, and the full consent of her owner, who turns back, sphinx-like, with a “come hither” gaze.

In addition to Amer’s newest canvases, in 2014, she added a new materiality to her repertoire: ceramics.

The viscosity of wet clay has affinities with the tangled embroidery of obfuscation seen in her paintings. She began taking classes at Greenwich House Pottery, in New York, a century-old workshop in the West Village that began as part of the settlement house movement early in