The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain will present the first major retrospective in Europe of Olga de Amaral, a key figure in the Colombian art scene and of Fiber Art.
The landmark exhibition brings together nearly ninety works made between the 1960s and now, many of which have never been shown outside of Colombia before. Beyond the vibrant gold-leaf pieces for which the artist is renowned, the exhibition reveals her earliest explorations and experimentations with textile, as well as her monumental works.
Since the 1960s, Olga de Amaral has been expanding the boundaries of the textile medium, continually experimenting with different materials (linen, cotton, horsehair, gesso, goldleaf, palladium) and techniques: she weaves, knots, braids, and interweaves threads to create monumental three-dimensional pieces. Without adopting a strictly chronological order, the show shines a light on the different periods that have characterized her artistic career: from her formal explorations (use of the grid, colours) to her experimentations (with materials and scale), as well as the influences that have nurtured her work (constructivist art, Latin-American handicrafts, the pre-Columbian era).
With this exhibition, the Fondation Cartier foregrounds the boldness of textile art, long marginalized due its perception as a decorative art essentially practiced by women. The exhibition’s architecture, designed by Lina Ghotmeh, plays on contrasts and scales, initiating a dialogue between the works, the Fondation Cartier building, and the surrounding landscape.
Olga de Amaral, 12th October 2024 – 16th March 2025, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.
About the artist
Born in 1932 in Bogotá, Olga de Amaral is an emblematic figure of the Colombian art scene. Following a degree in architecture at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca (1951-1952), she continued her studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (1954-1955), which has been compared to Germany’s Bauhaus school. While there, she discovered textile art in the weaving workshop of Marianne Strengell, a Finnish-American artist and designer who was one of the first to favor the structure and grid of textiles over the pattern.
In the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz, Amaral contributed to the
development of Fiber Art, using new materials and techniques drawing equally from Modernist principles
and the folk traditions of her native country. Her large-scale abstract works free themselves from the wall and refuse any form of categorization At once paintings, sculptures, installations, and architecture, they envelop viewers in the artist’s sensorial, personal universe. Appointed ‘Visionary Artist’ by New York’s Museum of Art and Design in 2005, Amaral more recently received the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Her work can be found in major public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Tate Modern, the MoMA, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, dedicated a major exhibition to her entitled To Weave a Rock.
