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Olga de Amaral

Colombian visual artist.

„Maintaining subtle links between age-old craft traditions from her home country and western academic art, the works of Olga de Amaral – at once vividly colourful and deafeningly sombre, monumental, small and intimate – have a distinctive timeless and totemic character. Through familial and traditional connections, the Colombian artist O. de Amaral is deeply attached to the Antioquia region in northern Colombia where her family originated. After a childhood in a warm and reassuring family context, O. de Amaral studied architecture at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca before enrolling in 1954 in the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, United States. There, she explored the world of textiles for the first time. After returning to Colombia, she combined her training built on the modernist principles of the Bauhaus with her cultural heritage. Discovering the richness in the art of weaving and traditional works of natural fibres, she tirelessly observed weavers spinning. This led her to conduct her first experiments with raw wool, tinted by natural colours and creating geometric motifs, a way of reconnecting with this artisanal practice. In the following years, the relative mathematical rigour in her early works gave way to a less predictable rhythm based on the colourful entanglement of woven strips of fabric (Muros [walls] series, 1970s).” - awarewomenartists.com

„Olga de Amaral's art practice transforms humble fibres into luminous fields of colour and sculptural presences, seamlessly blending contemporary art, craft, and design. Celebrated globally as a pioneer of post-war Latin American abstraction and fibre art, de Amaral's monumental weavings—often shimmering with gold or silver leaf—have earned her major retrospectives from Paris's Fondation Cartier to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. In 1986, she represented Colombia at the Venice Biennale.” - ocula.com

PREVIOUS NOTABLE EXHIBITS:

Olga de Amaral Fondation Cartier

October 11, 2024–March 15, 2025

Curated by Marie Perennès

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is presenting the first major retrospective in Europe of Olga de Amaral, a key figure of the Colombian art scene and of Fiber Art. The exhibition brings together nearly eighty works made between the 1960s and now, many of which have never been shown before outside of Colombia. Beyond the vibrant goldleaf pieces for which the artist is renowned, the exhibition reveals her earliest explorations and experimentations with textile, as well as her monumental works.

>>> FURTHER INFORMATION: www.fondationcartier.com

>>> ANOTHER ARTICLE: OLGA DE AMARAL AT THE FONDATION CARTIER POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN IN PARIS @ txtilezine.com (2025)

Location:

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain

261 boulevard Raspail

75014 Paris

Olga de Amaral

23 Sep-29 Oct 2022

www.lissongallery.com
The renowned Colombian artist Olga de Amaral opens her first solo show in London for almost a decade, following her inaugural exhibitions with Lisson Gallery in New York last year. This display of cascading, layered textiles and numinous clouds of hanging strands, among a range of other historic and recent pieces, reveals Amaral’s mastery of the loom and the woven language, but also the ways in which her practice crosses over into painting, sculpture and installation – being as much fine art as fibre art. While a recent touring museum exhibition in the US, entitled ‘To Weave a Rock’, introduced her to many new audiences, her work is seldom seen in such great depth in Europe, despite many of her earliest influences emanating from her travels and influences encountered here and elsewhere, between the 1950s and ’70s.

Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell St

27 Bell St
London
NW1 5BY

Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock at the Cranbrook Art Museum

By way of introducing the non-utilitarian textile practice of this Colombian artist to an audience mostly unfamiliar with her rich practice from the last five decades, the Cranbrook Art Museum commissioned a short video displayed in the entrance space, directed by Andrew Miller. Filmed in close-up in what appears as a single take, the artist directly speaks to the viewer about the essential role that color, texture, and structure, alongside the simplicity of a geometry of squares, circles, and triangles, play in her woven, braided, and knotted fabric “constructions” in space.

>>> CHECK OUT: detroitartreview.com

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