Olga de Amaral is one of Colombia’s great living cultural treasures. After receiving a degree in architectural design from the Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá in 1952, she left for the United States to study textiles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She later returned to her homeland to take up a post as founding director of the textiles department at Universidad de los Andes in 1965, becoming an important educator while at the same time developing her work both locally and internationally through commissions and exhibitions, thanks in no small part to a growing network of contacts facilitated by the World Crafts Council and textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen. Her works are owned by major museums throughout Asia, Europe, and North and South America, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum Bellerive in Zurich. Since 1958 she has been the subject of countless solo exhibitions and has featured in important group shows, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Modern Design: 1890–1990,” in 1992.
De Amaral’s art deftly bridges myriad craft traditions; it’s concerned with process and materiality, with the principles of formalism, abstraction, and metaphysicality. The artist has developed a distinct voice in her field through her command of conventional techniques for constructing textile objects while progressively pushing the boundaries of orthodox understanding of how textiles work as objects in space. She has gradually moved fabric-based works beyond the category of woven tapestry—one that privileges flatness, adherence to the wall, pictorialism, and an obsession with the organic and physical properties of materials—into a more conceptual practice that embraces strategies otherwise found in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Consider a recently completed installation, Brumas, 2013, which is composed of seven discrete works that combine to make one. Its pigment-saturated strands of fiber create a cloudlike curtain of imagery that resolves differently depending on the angle from which it is viewed. Not only does Brumas redefine the space it occupies physically through displacement, but its ethereal array of visual sequences imprints itself on its surroundings. De Amaral employs a range of materials—from silver and gold leaf to brightly colored pigments, all of which refer to the landscape and cultural history of Colombia—and painstakingly incorporates them into the fabric structures of her works over months of repeated hand application. The resulting objects are hefty, but they strike the viewer as simultaneously intimate and monumental, a phenomenon that is not necessarily a function of scale. Her smaller wall hangings can exude an energy that exceeds their size simply through the dynamic manipulation of weaving patterns and use of color. Sometimes bright, colorful, reflective, and biomorphic, at other times muted, dark, absorptive, and geometric, these works exhibit the same capacity for creating the perception of infinite space found in the works of modernist painters of the last century, from Kandinsky and Malevich to Reinhardt and Rothko. Likewise, her large-scale pieces, both the totemic works and the installations that array a number of panels together in a space, have the capacity to feel intimate despite their size. De Amaral achieves this through a delicacy of execution that softens the otherwise imposing presence of these pieces and also forges a relationship with the scale of the viewer through an understanding of how both art and the body function in space.
De Amaral’s works feel at once primitive and contemporary; they refer to indigenous traditions found in centuries-old civilizations, but their execution and presentation conform to concerns found in our own time. They can appear ephemeral and illusory while also petrified with age. It is this duality that lends her work a timeless quality. Her art is anthropological, exploring ideas found in the way we understand history as it is expressed in objects and how we perceive form, color, and material in the world around us.
This article appears in the October 2013 issue of Modern Painters.
To see images, click on the slideshow.
“Olga de Amaral: Selected Works” will be on view at the Louise Blouin Foundation, at 3 Olaf Street, London, from October 14-30, 2013.
