For more than six decades, Olga de Amaral has blurred the lines between fiber art and fine art, carefully coloring, knotting, collaging, and alchemizing threads and textiles into paintings, sculptures, and majestic installations that play with texture and light.
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1932, de Amaral studied architectural drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in her hometown before being introduced to fiber as a medium in 1954, when she apprenticed with Finnish-American designer and textile connoisseur Marianne Strengell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. Since then, de Amaral has developed an oeuvre considered among the most important examples of post-war Latin American abstraction. In 1973, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship; she participated in the 1986 Venice Biennale; and her works are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Tate Collection in London. And now, at 90 years old, de Amaral’s creations are as current as ever.
On view at Lisson Gallery from September 23 to October 29, “Olga de Amaral” is the Colombian artist’s first solo show in London since 2015. Highlighting seminal works from the past two decades of her trailblazing career, the exhibition features iconic tapestries mingled with gesso, gold leaf, and palladium, as well as an array of oneiric three-dimensional installations de Amaral masterfully builds from thread.
“I let myself get carried away by dreams,” de Amaral says. “My mind follows these thoughts, these dreams I get until there’s an encounter. Let’s say I’m imagining something, and suddenly I kind of see an image, then I know I have to act to catch that dream, to prevent that dream from slipping away. It’s very abstract, but that’s what goes through my head,” she explains.
De Amaral has been based in her beloved Bogotá for most of her life, a city she says gives her a unique “sense of freedom, in the most profound sense of the word.” She has never considered living anywhere else, and for over 30 years, she has worked with the same seven female studio assistants who help to bring her unearthly creations to life.
Still, de Amaral’s international travels between the 1950s and 1970s greatly informed her artistic practice. In one visit to the studio of British ceramicist Lucie Rie in 1970, for instance, the South American artist was charmed by the Japanese practice of kintsugi—the art of reassembling broken pottery with gold. That fascination translated into her work Fragmentos Completos (Complete Fragments), one of the first instances in which she introduced gold leaf into her hand-woven creations.
Indeed, if de Amaral has become renowned for one thing, it’s the intervention of unexpected materials in her fiber art. In some earlier pieces, such as Adherencia Natural (Natural Adherence, 1973) and Riscos (Cliffs, 1987), she famously used wool and horsehair to create intricate wall hangings with a unique texture. Meanwhile, in a standout piece from her upcoming London show, Luz Blanca (White Light, 1969/2010), the artist assembled sheets of translucent plastic into a large (137-by-61-inch) tapestry that seems to take the form of a luminescent cataract.
Speaking about her fascination with gold, which appears in many of her most iconic works, de Amaral remarks that “the color gold has a kind of magic to it, and it’s not about what it means, it’s about what it reflects and illuminates.” Beyond its aesthetic qualities, the artist is also inspired by the ceremonial use of gold in pre-Hispanic and Colonial art. In Strata VX (2009), the artist employs linen, gesso, acrylic, and gold leaf to create a grand (88-by-79-inch) tapestry that undulates with light. And in Cesta Lunar 50B (Lunar Basket 50B, 1991/2017), she uses platinum and gold leaf to create an even larger (137-by-86-inch) wall hanging that experiments with scintillating metallic shades.
Despite the captivating detail in de Amaral’s works, she has often described her creations as “accidental.” She claims she is deeply driven by a sense of miracle and profoundly impressed by the power of curiosity. It’s what led her to create the fascinating Brumas (Mists), diaphanous installations of painted hanging threads that coalesce as colorful three-dimensional shapes. “It was an accident. I was working with loose threads —they’re independent characters, all of these threads— and first, a single thread appeared, then there was a multitude of them, intersecting, intertwined, and when these threads began to meld, the Brumas appeared,” she says.
In Bruma R (2014), one of the most show-stopping pieces in the Lisson Gallery exhibition, the artist uses acrylic, gesso, and cotton on wood to assemble delicate skeins of painted thread that hang vertically from a rectangular frame, creating a soft triangular prism containing a red and black geometric form that changes with the viewer’s perspective. Bruma T (2014) follows a similar dynamic structure, although it contains a mustard-colored circle with a black border that also shifts according to where spectators are standing.
A master of the loom, Amaral is certain she owes everything to the simplicity and infinite possibilities of thread. “Thread is like a pencil,” she says. “I am amazed by the process of coloring thread. Painting thread is so elemental, and yet without being able to do this, I wouldn't be able to do anything.”