Olga de Amaral (born 1932) is a Colombian textile and visual artist known for her large-scale abstract works made with fibers and covered in gold and/or silver leaf. She was one of the few artists from South America internationally known for her work in fiber art during the 1960s and ‘70s. She lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.
From the beginning, Olga de Amaral’s art has been driven by the creation of works that redefine our notions of unity, concept, representation, and personal expression. de Amaral explores and revisits ideas, techniques, and processes, looking for subtle and intricate variations within her own artistic process. She is an important figure among a globally dispersed group of artists who are deconstructing and rethinking the structure, surface, and support of painting by adding sculptural dimensions and atypical materials. Her work takes the elements of painting off the stretcher and into space, approaching the problem of the superposition, of layering in a painting form the point of view of the material itself – the painting’s support, the canvas, the fabric or texture.
At first categorised as two dimensional, representational wall hangings, in the late 1960s her works entered the genres of sculpture, installation, abstract and conceptual art:
“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, pictorials, and an obsession with the organic and the physical properties of materials – into a more conceptual practice that embraces strategies otherwise found in painting, sculpture, and architecture.”
The way the artist incorporates the materials, natural and man-made fibres, paint, gesso, and precious metals (gold and silver leaf mostly), through the handcraft, artisanal process and techniques, reference Colombia’s pre-Hispanic art, indigenous weaving traditions, and the Spanish Colonial Baroque legacy, brought to the New World by the Catholic colonists. As Twylene Moyer indicated, this inspiration is “a true mestizaje, or mixing of cultures.”
What those cultures had in common, was that they all attributed great expressive power to the visual, just as de Amaral’s work embody visual and tactile content “reconnecting us to an ancient understanding and appreciation of images as presences unto themselves, capable of transcending materiality to express truth through beauty”. This ability to connect the ancient and the contemporary has allowed the artist to create works on the premise that “art has the power to transcend representation and embody spiritual and emotional values through form. (…) Her tapestries are nothing less than meditations on the illusive nature of meaning.”
Thread, color and light determine the visual and metaphorical aspect of de Amaral’s works. “I began to work with fiber by coincidence – a sought coincidence – and have continued with it because it has never disappointed me. As I get to know it better, the better it knows me. In briefer words, it has never stopped arousing my curiosity. Fiber is like an old pencil: one has used it for so long that you take it for granted. I am made of fiber because I have embraced it and because I know it“. Olga de Amaral on color: “When I think about color, when I touch color, when I live color – the intimate exaltation of my being, my other self – I fly, I feel as another, there is always another being next to me.”
De Amaral’s art is most often interpreted through the themes of architecture, mathematics, and socio-cultural dichotomies in Colombia, but mostly landscape: “Fascinated by the shapes of rocks, streams, hills, mountains, and clouds, she finds inspiration in the broken textures and movements of the landscapes surrounding her home in Bogotá. From the geometric designs of medieval cosmological diagrams to the grids of Mondrian, harmonious symmetry of form has alluded to and partaken of perfection and the absolute.” Her oeuvre is characterized by various series, each with a particular essence or technique that encompass a plethora of intricate variations developed throughout her career. The titles of de Amaral’s numerous series reveal the themes behind her weavings: Alchemies, Moonbaskets, Lost Images, Ceremonial Cloths, Writings, Forests, Rivers, Mountains, Moons, Square Suns, Umbras, Stelae, etc. As Amparo Osorio pointed out, “much of poetry (…) emerges from these images in movement, whose titling (…) is another referent for us to achieve an understanding of this recondite sense, of that desire to say in the language of symbols all that is beyond words.“
