Image: Es Baluard, Palma
Es Baluard Museu de Palma will open 'Ghada Amer. Sculpture Since 1991' on 17 September 2026, with a public inauguration at 7 pm and free entry. The exhibition runs in Espai A until 31 January 2027 and is curated by Clara Garau and David Barro. The museum’s announcement frames the presentation as a focused look at Amer’s sculptural practice since 1991, alongside the artist’s broader move between painting and three-dimensional work.
The exhibition page describes Amer as a pioneer in the way she resolves painting and ceramic sculpture, emphasizing her interest in perception, ambiguity and the relationship between image and meaning. According to the museum, her work does not present its message literally but instead places it in what it calls an intermediate space between opposites: between one image and another, one gender and another, one discipline and another. That positioning is central to the project at Es Baluard, where the artist’s ceramic pieces, bronzes and painted works are brought into dialogue.
Born in Cairo in 1963 and raised in Nice from the age of eleven, Amer completed her academic training in France, earning both undergraduate and MFA degrees at Villa Arson, the École Nationale Supérieure de Nice in 1989. She also studied sculpture for two semesters in 1987 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then moved to Paris in 1991 for postgraduate study at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Since 1996, she has lived and worked between New York and Cairo, according to the museum text.
Es Baluard’s exhibition notes place Amer within an international career that includes major institutional presentations at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Stedelijk Museum in 2024, and earlier exhibitions at Desert X and Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2021. The museum also cites retrospective exhibitions at the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille in 2022 and the Brooklyn Museum in 2008, as well as appearances at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and other public institutions.
The wall text for the exhibition highlights Amer’s use of sewing, embroidery, ceramic glaze and bronze as part of a practice that links the personal, cultural, political and social. It also points to the artist’s sources, including the transcultural exchange between Egypt, France and the United States that has shaped her career. The museum writes that her ceramic fountains, made in collaboration with the Mallorca pottery workshop Pere Coll, will feature in the presentation, and that the installation uses screens that both shield and hold the images, drawing viewers closer to the relief works.
Alongside the exhibition’s sculptural focus, Es Baluard underscores Amer’s longstanding engagement with painting as an act that informs her sculptural forms. The museum’s text describes her ceramic works as unpredictable in form and color, and relates them to ancient painted sculpture, including the legacy of polychrome sculpture in ancient Egypt. The show will occupy Espai A from 17 September 2026 through 31 January 2027.
