Olga de Amaral

de Amaral's work, Montaña #13, was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign.

After the year 2000 Olga de Amaral started the following series: Ombríos, Mapas, Escritos, Aguas/Aquas, Glyphs, Alforjas, Espejos, Piedras, Stratas, Nudos, Memorias, Policromos, Entre ríos, Pozos azules, the series Sol rojo, Árboles, Brumas, Dos mitades, Moyas, Nébulas, Fósiles, Núcleos, Rocas, Minutas, Improntas and Lienzos.

In the series of the Estelas started in 1996, just like with the Umbras, the inside and outside again came to the artist's consideration. The title refers to the Spanish word estrella that stands for star and "es tela" that stands for "is [made of] fabric". Olga de Amaral has always considered the back of her pieces as a side to experiment, but in this series she decided to work on both sides as equal. The front of the Stelae is luminous gold and the back dark silver, still maintaining the vestiges of the original experimental function of this side. "I think of them as stones full of space, each one a presence full of secrets. Many together, like mounds of stones or rocks, point to an answer, an unknown order, a hidden history". These pieces gained a three-dimensional character as they are always exhibited suspended from the ceiling at different elevations and angles and in a group, with each side (golden or silver) facing in one direction. The effect of these pieces is contradictory - being both solid surfaces, bringing the solidity of the ruins of past civilisations, and at the same time floating and immutable. The Stelae were shown at Galería Diners in Bogotá and in museums in the United States and Europe in 1999.

In the 1990s Olga de Amaral started the following series: Vesitigios, Ríos, Puertas, Pueblos, Cajas, Umbras, Bosques, Segmentos, Mementos, Imágenes perdidas, Entornos quietos, Sombras, Lunas, Paisajes heredados, Estelas and the series Prosa and Soles cuadrados.

The series Ceremonial Cloths was started in 1986 and continued through 1998. The title refers to ceremonial garments. Each piece in this series is "infused" with strong, deep color that emerges from the unified background surface. This series explores the way in which images emerge from a woven surface and the creation of a sense of depth. The superpositions of layers of thread create an aerial interplay of light that connects this series with Op Art's artistic problems.

This period is characterized by enthusiastic experimentation and the introduction of new materials. During her visit to Japan for an exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, de Amaral begins to explore the use of gold and gesso inspired by Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Her exploration of gold as a material and as a color begins. She also continues to explore the possibilities of structure. Light and air filtering through woven constructions become major players. In the 1980s Olga de Amaral started the following series: Riscos, Tejidos policromos, Tierras, Tablas, Entornos, Cestas lunares, Lienzos ceremoniales, Alquimias and Montañas.

The title of the series refers to the stones used for building. The series includes the works Vestiduras de Calicanto, Paredes de Calicanto and Paisajes de calicanto and has been started in 1977. The pieces in this series are larger weavings in grass, light earth tones and sandy hues.

In the 1970s Olga de Amaral started the following series: Muros, Corazas, Hojarascas, Marañas, Estructuras, Fragmentos completos, the Calicanto series, Farallones and Eslabones. "From the beginning of her career in the 1960s, certainly from the Muros and Hojarascas of the 1970s, Amaral had made it clear that the debate over whether weaving was art or craft would be, in her case at least, moot. From the onset, there has been a distinct sense in her work that it could, and did, embody important ideas and reflections of an existential and historical character".

During her stay in Paris in the early 1970s, living in small spaces, Olga created a series of small pieces entitled Complete Fragments (1975). In this series the artist used gold for the first time, playing and experimenting with it. She also started to paint fibres with acrylic paint and gesso to obtain colors directly on the finished woven piece in order to dissolve the geometry imposed by the rigid structure of warp and weft. These poetic sketches were shown at the Rivolta Gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland. This technical innovation gave the artist much more freedom with the final surfaces of the works than the color-dyed fibres. It also moved her tapestries from the "crafts" to the "fine-arts" category. "Color is language common to all cultures. Color helps me to distance myself from the surface to add different meanings to the tapestry." The Fragments begin a period of mostly monochromatic works culminating with the Calicanto series.

On a rapid visit to Ireland to participate in a World Craft Council conference in 1970, on her way back to Colombia, Olga passed by Lucie Rie's studio in London (she met the British ceramist at the conference). She inspired her to incorporate gold into tapestries: "That afternoon in London I noticed a break in a ceramic vase. Lucy Rie explained to me that the breakage didn't exist for her because she transformed the piece when she mended it with gold leaf, as do the Japanese when prized porcelain breaks. The concept touched me in some mysterious place of my mind". The Alchemies series, started in 1983/84 and ongoing, was the first series made entirely with gold leaf, which the artist considered, just as the alchemists did, as a symbol of knowledge. The pieces from this series are rectangular mini "canvases" made out of cotton and prepared with white-washed gesso to be covered with acrylic paint and gold/silver leaf. After experimenting with the large scale, Olga de Amaral wanted to return to a human scale. The first 13 works in the series are based on the proportion of the human figure and inspired by the ancestral culture of Peru - its objects and science, especially mathematics. Also, when the artists visited the village of Barichara in northern Colombia, the architectural landscape of that beautiful town inspired the materials and colors used in the first pieces in the series too - clay-colored linen predominantly with white, gold and blue tones. Gold has played an important role both in various Native American cultures and in the Catholic religion. The artist realised that the application of gold made the weaving appear heavy and flexible, a quality she was looking for after the early large scale weavings that had an architectural and sculptural intention. Unlike those massive constructions woven with heavy fibres such as horsehair and coarse hand-spun wool, the Alchemies are more concerned with how surfaces, textures and finishes transform the space they occupy or contain. The pieces from this series hang in a vertical, gravitational way and separated from the wall, as if they were living in their own unique space. The effect, the atmospheres they create when hung together are similar to when you enter a colonial church or the burial chambers of pre-Columbian cultures. "It has always been my desire to induce a (…) state of silence in the places where I install my pieces."

In the late 60's, with the creation of the piece Entrelazado en naranja, gris, multicolor (1969), de Amaral eventually "exploded the picture plane from inside out". At the end of this period, the artist left the fundamental concept of fabric weaving (the opposition between warp and weft), by leaving only the warp (in the form of braiding) and letting it float freely. The full form or volume stressed in the composition of the pieces from this period, make them look almost like thread sculptures. However, after this period of pushing the art of weaving to its boundaries, in the next decade, the issue of the flat surface will emerge again in de Amaral's art. Olga's massive hangings called Muros tejidos (Woven Walls), solid bulwarks built from stiff wool and horsehair, debuted at a solo exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York in 1970. In 1971 Olga took part in an exhibition "Deliberate Entanglements" at the University of California, Los Angeles organised by its art professor Bernard Kester. It showed American and Eastern European fiber art for the first time in Southern California. It reflected the era's revolutionary fiber sculpture, particularly its tendency towards monumentality. "When I started to show my work in Europe and the USA, it was considered art, not crafts. And it was then that I realised that it was not the weaving, but the visual quality that now mattered in my creations."

In 1966-1967 the Amaral family lived in New York. There, Olga de Amaral met Eileen Vanderbilt from the World Crafts Council and became the Council's Colombian representative. With Larsen's collaboration, Olga de Amaral displayed her tapestries in New York City (during a 1967 solo exhibition in Larsen's New York showroom), and taught at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. After returning to Colombia, the Amarals travelled to Popayán and Tierradentro region with its must-see San Agustín. Later Olga visited Peru as the WCC representative. On a rapid visit to Ireland to participate in a WCC conference, Olga met Lucie Rie, a British ceramist who inspired her to incorporate gold into the tapestries. At the beginning of the seventies, the Amarals moved to Barcelona and then to Paris. They visited Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, and England. They made contacts with the centres of European art. They lived for a time in Europe, then returned to Bogotá, visited different areas of Colombia, and then went back to France, amid exhibits, work, and new friendships. Another important journey for the artist was her travel to Japan.

The early period of de Amaral's oeuvre is characterised by visually relatively traditional tapestries, but already presenting the search for an individual language through formal experimentations. Since the mid60s, she worked mostly with hand-spun wool, cotton, linen, and dyes. Vivid colors and bold combinations and the exploration of the structure and edges of weaving characterize some of her small scale early work of this period. The geometric conception and composition of these works reveal a profound awareness and understanding of the modern artistic tendencies of the time, bringing to mind the De Stijl abstraction current among others. In 1966 the Amarals were invited by Miguel Arroyo to show their work at the Fine Arts Museum in Caracas, Venezuela. It was the first solo show by Olga de Amaral outside her native country. In 1967 Olga presented her work for the first time at the prominent Lausanne Biennale in Switzerland, the first out of six later appearances at that event. In 1969 Olga de Amaral took part in a collective exhibition of 27 fiber artists at MoMA New York entitled “Wall Hangings”. It was an international exhibition curated by an architecture and design curator Mildred Constantine organised with Jack Lenor Larsen and presented not in the architecture and design lobby as usual for the fiber artists, but in the art section of MoMA, that up until then was reserved only for painting or sculpture. This was the importance of that exhibition - it addressed the transformations in the medium of fiber art, noted differences between the continents and anticipated the experimentation to come.

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:

The Walls was the first series where the artist started to take more risks that led her to break with predictable geometric patterns and replace them by rhythms that for the first time engaged the eye into the work. The inclusion of the viewer in the experience, together with the growing dimensions of de Amaral's works, marked a threshold in the artist's career and put her on the international fine arts map: “(…) in the late 1960s through the mid-70s (…) fiber artists became more attentive to the shape and dimensions of the architectural context and the phenomenological experience of the viewer.(…) So when a work like Olga de Amaral’s six-story El Gran Muro was installed in 1976 in the lobby of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, the wall functioned less as a backdrop or frame than a determinant of the wool-and-horsehair tapestry’s monumental, vertical form”.

In 1955, after a year in Cranbrook, she returned to Colombia and started to make decorative textiles on commission for her architect friends. Meanwhile, Jim Amaral served in the U.S. Navy on a base in the Philippines. In 1956, Jim Amaral visited Colombia to see Olga, initially for a few weeks. They married in 1957 and settled in Bogotá. They had two children, Diego and Andrea, and started a workshop for handwoven textiles. During that period, Jack Lenor Larsen visited Colombia and the Amaral's workshop. He expressed interest in Olga's tapestries. Their professional and artistic relationship became crucial in projecting her work into the international world of contemporary tapestry. In 1965, de Amaral founded and taught at the Textile Department at the University of Los Andes (Colombia) in Bogotá.

In 1954, de Amaral went to New York City to study English at Columbia University. From 1954 to 1955, she studied fiber art at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She stated about her time there as a student: "In Cranbrook, the textile workshop had eight looms placed against the windows: one of them, in the corner, would be my home for a year. There, I lived my most intimate moments of solitude; there was born my certainty about color; its strength; I felt as if I loved color as though it were something tangible. I also learned to speak in color. I remember with nostalgia that experience in which souls touched hands". At Cranbrook, de Amaral met Jim Amaral and they became close friends.

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. Because of her ability to reconcile local concerns with international developments, de Amaral became one of the few artists from South America to become internationally known for her work in fiber during the 1960s and ‘70s. She is also considered an important practitioner in the development of postwar Latin American Abstraction. She currently lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.

Olga de Amaral was born Olga Ceballos Velez in 1932 in Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia, to parents from Colombia's Antioquia region. She was raised in a traditional religious family with 5 sisters and 2 brothers. She grew up in a traditional neighbourhood in Bogotá in a warm, safe family atmosphere, maintaining a special relationship with her loving and caring mother. Upon graduating from high school, in the years 1951–52 she got a degree in Architectural Design at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá. After graduation, the future textile artist worked for a year as a director of the Architectural Drawing Faculty at the same school.