Olga de Amaral at the Fondation Cartier
The Fondation Cartier in Paris presents the first major European retrospective exhibition of Olga de Amaral. Covering two floors of the museum and featuring over 80 artworks, the exhibition offers an incredible opportunity to dive into the extensive career of this pioneering artist.
A household name for some, a discovery for others, Olga de Amaral has been consistently making ground-breaking art for over seventy-years. Born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1932, de Amaral attended Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan, in the 1950s, an experimental institution that is known to have led the way for the modernist movement to emerge in the USA. Here, she worked under the Finnish-American artist Marianne Strengell, who introduced her to textile design and weaving, as well as to the teachings of the Bauhaus, which the school was deeply engaged with. De Amaral decided to return to Bogotá after graduating, establishing her studio in 1955, as well as a decorative fabrics company with her husband. No doubt she could have had a successful career in the United States and been directly involved with emerging modernist, textile and installation art movements there, but by returning to her home and being intimately connected to her heritage and her inspiration, de Amaral’s work became transformative and distinctly unique. In addition to her studies with the Bauhaus, she was deeply influenced by the richness of pre-Colombian art – including the use of gold, colour and bold geometric shapes, as well as the Colombian landscape. She was also unafraid of experimenting with modern materials, such as plastic, in her weavings and sculptures.
The exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, the first (and long overdue) European retrospective of her work, covers two floors of the institution with over 80 works from the 1960s to the present. The exhibition design was created by Lina Ghotmeh, who applied her principle of “archaeology of the future”: an architecture born of multi-cultural exploration that engages both memory and the senses, reinventing the traces of the past.
De Amaral often works large scale, and the ground floor gallery space features several massive weavings that are directly inspired by the landscape. Thick swatches of fabric are superimposed and sewn together to create a cascade of woven textiles in earthy/autumnal tones of reds, yellows, browns that feels directly inspired by nature. In this gallery space, which is surrounded by floor to ceiling windows, Ghotmeh has brought in large slate rocks taken from the surrounding gardens, further playing with the connection between indoors and outdoors.
In the other ground-floor gallery space, the museum has installed a large-scale installation titled Brumas (2013). Consisting of thousands of cotton threads coated with gesso and finished with acrylic paint, the complex installation is both delicate and immersive. Its subtle gradations of colour and shape play with ideas of kinetic abstraction. Installed from the ceiling, the delicate hanging threads feel like a soft rain of colour, as if experiencing a 3D painting.
In the darkly-lit downstairs gallery space, the exhibition is loosely divided among various themes connected to her practice: ‘The legacy of modernism’, ‘Weaving, braiding, knotting, experimenting’, ‘In search of light’, and ‘Textile as language’ are a few. Many pieces are suspended from the ceiling or hung in such a way as to see both sides of the work, as de Amaral often designed the weavings or installations to be seen and experienced from all sides. This also allows us to see the intricate detail that goes into each weaving, from the way they are held together to the subtle shifts in colour. In this basement space, Ghotmeh was inspired by the spiral motif that appears in much of de Amaral’s work, and the flow of the exhibition design encourages a natural interaction with the work. Several pieces from her iconic Estelas series, begun in 1996 and encompassing nearly 70 pieces in total, are included in the exhibition. The gilded stelae are made of up of a woven structure of stiff cotton and a layer of gesso, paint and gold leaf. The life-sized sculptures connect to archaeological ruins, megaliths or totems and have a deeply embedded spiritual quality to them. It’s near impossible not to stand in awe in front of so many of her artworks. The scale and technique, the use of gold and other striking materials feels symbolic and powerful, yet intimate and revelatory at the same time.
A 300-page illustrated catalogue was produced for the exhibition and includes texts by Lina Ghotmeh, Ann Coxon, Marie Perennès and Maria Willis Londono.
The Olga de Amaral retrospective exhibition will be on view at the Fondation Cartier through March 16, 2025.
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