An essential Colombian artist, she is a pioneer of textile Art. Meeting in Bogotá and deciphering his work before an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier.
Bogota. A curtain of rain screens the city, orange ocher and green, with its raw brick architecture surrounded by mountains with lush vegetation. For a bit, it feels like a tapestry by Olga de Amaral, such as those that can be admired from October 12 at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. “We are the children of our landscape,” prophesied Lawrence Durrell. And Olga, a pioneer of the Colombian art scene and Fiber Art, alongside Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz, has continued to weave the landscape. Its territory, Colombia.
Casa Amaral, a vast residence protected by barbed wire, is located in a chic area of the capital. It’s been four decades since Jim, her husband, and Olga bought it. He, 91, she, 92, sitting side by side in the dining room, taking each other’s hands from time to time as a last defense. Crazy elegant, he in a stylish suit, she in Issey Miyake from head to toe. Two artists whose worlds do not intersect. Jim, sculptor of a surrealist vein with a universe worthy of Lautréamont and his famous formula: “Beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. » Olga, proponent of an unclassifiable work – at the crossroads of the modernist principles of Bauhaus, vernacular traditions and pre-Columbian art – which emerges from the European New Tapestry movement born in the 1960s. No echoes or correspondences in the works of Olga and Jim, like this Casa Amaral, a hodgepodge of the duo with their juxtaposed tapestries and sculptures, so different. A little wink, however, shows their attachment: Jim tied a red and black tie woven by Olga, who wears a heavy necklace designed by Jim.
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Emotions, memories, connections
Their children, Andrea and Diego, are there, caring, offering cakes. With old age, memory falters a little. Olga remembers the beautiful things: her meeting with Jim, a superb Californian of Portuguese origin, at Cranbrook University, in Michigan, where she was introduced to textile art in the mid-1950s; the markets of her childhood, saturated with colors, intoxicating with scents, where she was fascinated by the dexterity of the peasant women who knit as they walked; his imaginary house, an abandoned place a stone’s throw from his sister’s, a sort of matrix of his work with the stone columns, the light wood floor, the patterns of blue flowers on the walls, the tangled roof tiles which resemble the small squares of her formal vocabulary, with which she creates ribbons, the raw material for her surfaces… And besides, she notes, text and textiles are not far away; and Olga’s stories, made of emotions, memories, connections, are told, as among the pre-Columbians, in weaving. The artist has axioms: “The loom is the basis of everything” or “Everything happens by accident”.
She woven everything – linen, cotton, horsehair, etc. – and coated its fibers with gesso (Italian plaster), stucco, covered them with rice paper… Warps and wefts drawing suns, spirals, circles, spaces for meditation, contemplation, reflection. A monumental, gold-colored format sits in a lounge at El Nogal, a very select club in Bogotá’s business district. Titled Lunar Environment and completed in 1995, the commission is representative of the mystical side of his art. On February 7, 2023, a car bomb attack attributed to the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), in front of this club which is a symbol of power, caused numerous victims and set the building on fire. The fire ravaged part of El Nogal, but the work emerged intact. An icon. Decryption, following pages, with Marie Perennès, art historian, specialist in Latin American arts and curator of the exhibition.
Lunar Basket 50B1991-2017
“Literally, “Moon basket”. A poetic, somewhat enigmatic title, which undoubtedly refers to the Yanomami culture, an indigenous community in South America which worships the Moon. With The Lunar WayOlga combines palladium or silver with gold for the first time. The artist’s use of gold dates back to the 1970s. At that time, she met the ceramist Lucie Rie in London, very inspired by the kintsugi, a Japanese technique for repairing ceramics using gold powder. Olga, who was then based in Paris, produced small formats where she included gold leaf. Back in Bogotá, she will develop this work on a large scale. Gold refers both to this idea of repair but also to precolonial culture: there is a gold museum in Bogotá, without forgetting the airport called El Dorado. The Lunar Way is also the symbol of the transition from day to night, from the Sun to the Moon. Many of his works speak of the cycle of time. There is something very spiritual in his work. »
Brumas T, Q and R, 2014
” THE Mists (mists) is a series that Olga started in 2013 and which she is still continuing. There is the idea of fine rain following fog. These works are made of hanging threads, hand-dyed one after the other. They compose geometric patterns that echo pre-Columbian architecture and textiles. We present around twenty of them in the exhibition. Suspended at different heights, they give the impression of a colorful cloud which is reflected in the glass walls of the Fondation Cartier… Olga has worked a lot on the materiality of textiles, notably freeing herself from its two-dimensional side. Sculptural, three-dimensional, his works take over space, forcing the viewer to turn around in order to understand them. When hung closely, it looks like work in the style of Jesús-Rafael Soto. In this respect, they have to do with Venezuelan kinetic art. Olga has a relationship with art in public space. »
Strata XV, 2009
“It is a very interesting work, because it reveals both Olga’s love of gold, the reflections of light, and her taste for Colombian landscapes. She comes from Medellín, a city in the heart of the Andes, far from Colombia in the Caribbean. This region has a particular biotope, with its mountains, its valleys, its plants. When she later moved to Bogotá, she found an Andean city surrounded by mountains, at an altitude of more than 2,500 meters. Olga’s work constantly alludes to Colombian landscapes, either in the titles or formally, as here. The way she weaves the cotton threads together creates a relief. A sort of topographical map where we recognize the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, which peaks at almost 6,000 meters. Strata means “stratum”, a way of evoking the mountainous landscape of Colombia, but also all the geological layers. The reverse of Strata XV is woven entirely in red. This is a particularity of Olga. Pay attention to the reverse, which can be blue, have patterns, and suggest something else. She never takes a work as a two-dimensional tapestry. »
Stela 45, 2013
“Polysemic, the title is a contraction of the words “star” and “stele”. This is a series started in the mid-1990s, which is not closed, even if, today, Olga works on it much less than before. We present around fifteen of them in the exhibition. Here again, Olga pushes textiles far. She uses the gessoan Italian plaster, which covers very tightly woven strips. These are sculptural objects. Human-sized, somewhat anthropomorphic, these constructions are reminiscent of the menhirs and votive sculptures of major pre-Columbian archaeological sites, such as San Agustín. These works speak of death, of life after death, they are very metaphysical. Here is a quote from Olga: “A stone conceals the secret of the universe. Together or separately, the stones provide an answer. With their imposing size and dignity, they are the links connecting earth to heaven, flesh to spirit. Captive in the silence of stone, there is an answer.” Everything is said! »
“Olga de Amaral” exhibition, from October 12 to March 16, 2025, at the Cartier Foundation, in Paris. foundationcartier.com