Art is divine
Color as Language
Photographer Véronique Mati - Text Micha Christos
LA FONDATION CARTIER
Paris
From October 12, 2024 to March 16, 2025
OLGA DE AMARAL
The Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporary is presenting for the f irst time in Europe a major retrospective of Olga de Amaral. A key figure on the Colombian art scene and in Fiber Art, she was born in Bogota in 1932.
After graduating in architecture from the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca (1951-1952), she continued her studies at the Cranbrook Academy in Michi gan (1954-1955), in line with the teachings of the German Bauhaus.
She discovered textile art in the weaving workshop of Marianne Strengell, a Finnish-American artist and designer who favored weft over pattern. T he exhibition brings together nearly 90 works created between the 1960s and today.
Her famous vibrant creations in gold leaf are displayed alongside her monumental abstract pieces and her early experimental textile research.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Olga de Amaral participated alongside Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz in the development of Fiber Art using new materials and new techniques borrowed from both modernist principles and popular traditions of Colombia. Far from walls and any categorization, her works are at once paintings, sculptures, installations and architectures.
At the surface of the soul and skin, they envelop the public in the intimate and sensory universe of this visionary artist.
Olga de Amaral has seized the textile medium with grace and talent and has used materials as different as horsehair, gesso or linen, gold leaf and palladium.
Like Arachne, she weaves, knots, braids, intertwines the threads in sumptuous three-dimensional works that unite the earth to the sky.
She was able to draw on the vernacular traditions of her country as well as on pre-Columbian art to revolutionize textile art and give it a modernity beyond time and space. It was in the 1970s that her ceramicist friend Lucie Rie introduced her to the Japanese tech nique of kintsugi, which consists of repairing an object by highlighting its fault lines with gold powder.
This metal quickly became one of her favorite materials, allowing her to transform textiles into an iridescent surface that diffracts and reflects light. Too often textile art has been relegated to the background as a simple decorative art abandoned to women, but Olga de Amaral’s creations are bold and unconven tional, resolutely linked to post-World War II abstract art.
This exceptional retrospective shows in particular her essential contribution to the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Two large series allow her to deploy her spontaneous and expansive style inspired by the history and landscapes of her native land by their tones and shapes evoking the high plateaus of the Andes mountain range, the valleys and the vast tropical plains, the Estelas (stars) and the Brumas (Mist).
Started in 1996, the Estelas take the form of steles gilded, composed of a very rigid cotton woven structure and covered with a thick layer of gesso, then acrylic paint and gold leaf that almost make you forget the fabric.
In 2013, Olga de Amaral initiated a new series called Brumas, three-di mensional aerial weavings, slightly moving and revealing simple geometric patterns directly painted on the cotton threads.
This time, it is a cloud, a f ine rain of pure color that the artist invites us to cross. The Franco-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh immersed herself in the artist’s inspirations and created a landscape of slate stones to unite interior and exterior.
She thus placed Olga de Amaral’s works in a mineral and rocky nature. She wove the space of the Foundation Cartier to take visitors on a timeless journey to the heart of the works, their sensations and their emotions.
Olga de Amaral’s works are featured in major public and private collections around the world, including the Tate Modern, MoMA, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. Olga de Amaral was named “Visionary Artist” by the Museum of Art & Design in New York in 2005 and received the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston dedicated a major exhibition to her entitled To Weave a Rock in 2021.
This artist met a friend in color whose language she understood and dreamed of its forms that came to life in her hands in a sacred and timeless geometry.
«By building surfaces, I create spaces for meditation, contemplation and reflection. Each small element that makes up the surface is not only significant in itself, but resonates with the whole, just as the whole deeply resonates with each of the elements that compose it»- Olga de Amaral
