Olga de Amaral Installation image. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
Olga de Amaral Installation image. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
As the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain celebrates its 40th anniversary and announces a relocation to the Place du Palais-Royal in 2025, a major retrospective of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral takes over the Jean Nouvel designed building on Boulevard Raspail in Paris. The exhibition features 90 works by the 92 year old, a pivotal figure in Latin America’s art scene. Visitors can embark on a journey through Amaral’s oeuvre from the 1960s to now, with many pieces being shown outside of Colombia for the first time.
Olga de Amaral. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
Olga de Amaral. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
For the past 60 years Olga de Amaral has been pushing the boundaries of textile art and design. Along with Sheila Hicks, Elsi Giauque, Aurelia Munoz, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Jagoda Buic, Olga de Amaral is part of an important movement founded in the 1960s and 1970s which elevated techniques traditionally used by peintres cartonniers, master weavers, or methods often associated with domestic handicraft, to the abstract, sculptural movement of fiber art. While Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz had a Tate Modern retrospective in 2022 featuring her radical woven fibre sculptures, and American artist Sheila Hicks, who developed her interest in working with fibers in South America, had a solo exhibition “Lignes de Vie” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2018, the Fondation Cartier exhibition is Amaral’s first major European retrospective and feels rather overdue considering her huge contribution to the fiber art movement.
Amaral’s unclassifiable work combines Modernist principles with pre-Columbian art and the vernacular traditions of her country. In 2018 Fondation Cartier presented six works from Amaral’s Brumas series as part of the Southern Geometries exhibition and are now retracing her entire career, celebrating the figure who helped spark a true revolution in the textile arts.
Fondation Cartier exterior photographed by Lee Sharrock.
Lee Sharrock
Olga de Amaral at Fondation Cartier is a major survey show that pays homage to the artist’s pioneering use of new materials and techniques, whilst spotlighting textile art as a significant artistic movement. Historically, textile art has too often been marginalised due to its perception as a domestic decorative art practice primarily by women. Resolutely entwined with the dynamics of post- World War II abstract art, Amaral broke out of conventional framework of traditional tapestry or textile art and this retrospective showcases her vital contribution to the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Olga de Amaral, quoted in the exhibition catalogue, says: “I discovered the color, texture, structure of the world of fabric. In a context so rich in possibilities, I learned how to approach that world in a contemporary fashion.”
An emblematic figure of the Colombian art scene, Olga de Amaral was born in 1932 in Bogotá. After completing an architecture degree at Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca (1951-1952) in Colombia, she moved to the United States to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (1954-1955). De Amaral discovered textile art at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Marianne Strengell’s weaving workshop. Finnish American artist and designer Strengell was an early pioneer of favouring the structure and grid of textiles over pattern. Cranbook followed Bauhaus teachings, and it was where Amaral discovered the work of Anni Albers and learned about Russian Constructivism, the strict grid of the De Stijl movement, and Kazimir Malevich’s Supremacist abstraction. This disciplined, Constructivist approach can be seen in some of the artworks exhibited at Fondation Cartier.
Amaral’s Bauhaus-inspired training combined with a knowledge of ancient Colombian textiles and folk traditions informed her early work, and soon her textile artworks were moving away from walls and becoming more three-dimensional and architectural.
Amaral’s love of color combined with a desire to experiment with composition, geometry and materials was born during her time at Cranbrook Academy. She developed these interests after returning to Colombia in 1955, combining them with her passion for Colombia’s natural beauty, its valleys, tropical plains and the high plateaus of the Andes, to create a uniquely expressive style veering between abstraction and geometry.
Two major series exhibited at Fondation Cartier are shining examples of Amaral’s fusion of color with a love of Colombia’s landscapes: the Estelas (Stars as well as Stelae) and the Brumas (Mists). Amaral started the ‘Estelas’ series in 1996, creating gilded stelae from a rigid woven cotton structure covered in a thick layer of gesso, then applying acrylic paint and goldleaf to conceal all trace of the fabric. Amaral discovered the Japanese technique of kintsugi in the 1970s through her friend, ceramicist Lucie Rie. The technique involved repairing objects by highlighting their cracks and areas of breakage using gold powder, a material which she adopted as it enabled her to transform textile into a light-reflecting surface.
She began a new series titled ‘Brumas’ in 2013, and a selection of these magical, three-dimensional textiles are suspended from the ceiling in the ground floor gallery of Fondation Cartier. Amaral painted simple geometric patterns directly on the cotton threads of the ‘Brumas’, which shimmer and move gently as people walk beneath them, creating the poetic effect of a diaphanous cloud containing a light rainstorm. Architect Lina Ghotmeh put filter on the glass of the building so that the hanging thread sculptures are reflected in the walls.
Olga de Amaral ‘Bruma’ artworks at Fondation Cartier.
Lee Sharrock
As evidenced in the Fondation Cartier retrospective, her innovative use of materials including cotton, gesso, horsehair, linen, gold leaf and palladium, combined with a mastery of ancient techniques such as braiding, knotting and weaving, enabled her to create vast three-dimensional textile pieces. Amaral’s large-scale abstract works free themselves from the wall and refuse any form of categorization.
Curator Marie Perennès spent three years working closely with Olga de Amaral in Colombia and French Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh on the exhibition, and the close collaboration between this triumvirate of perceptive women results in a fresh perspective on de Amaral’s six decade career.
Marie Perennès is an art historian and curator specializing in Latin American art with a focus on women artists, and her curation of the Olga de Amaral retrospective fits with her mission to deconstruct the hierarchy of artistic mediums and reconcile art with craft. Perennès explained to me as we walked through the exhibition together: “Textile was in submission to architecture. It was only decorative, put on the wall or used to keep a room warm.”
In order to create an organic and emotional journey through seminal artworks from Amaral’s career dating back to the 1960s, Architect Lina Ghotmeh looked to the artist’s sources of inspiration. On the ground floor of the glass and steel building, surrounded by the garden landscaped by Lothar Baumgarten, Ghotmeh has created a landscape of slate stones connecting the interior, exterior, and the works, as though they were set in a stony, rugged landscape.
I visited the exhibition during October on a sunny day in La Cité De La Lumière when the leaves on the trees outside the Fondation Cartier ranged from burnt umber to cadmium, vermillion to red ochre, bringing to mind a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’-“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”The timing of the exhibition seems fortuitous, with the autumnal palette of Amaral’s hanging textile works displayed on the ground floor echoed in the colours of the leaves visible through the vast glass windows.
Olga de Amaral exhibition curator, Fondation Cartier Press officer and Lee Sharrock.
Lee Sharrock
Amaral began using horsehair as a material in the late 1960s, exploiting its natural stiffness which enabled her to scale up her work, for example with ‘Gran Muro’ (‘Great Wall’) which features strips of different lengths and thicknesses stitched onto a cotton backing. The effect of the final artwork displayed in the exhibition is of a brick wall or a forest of dead leaves, which is mirrored beautifully by the autumnal leaves on the other side of the Fondation Cartier’s glass walls.
At the start of her career Amaral worked only with cotton and linen, and in later works she increased the size of her work. Marie Perennès explains: “First she was working only with cotton and linen. Then she wanted to increase the size of textile to achieve structural architectural dimension and confront architecture directly.”
Olga de Amaral installation image.
Lee Sharrock
Thoughtful curation, painstaking attention to detail and three years of communications back and forth between the curator, artist and architect have gone into this magnificent retrospective. Even the way the textiles are displayed in the first gallery of the exhibition, suspended from the ceiling with an arrangement of flat rocks on the floor, is a reimagining of the photo shoots de Amaral used to orchestrate with her textiles in mountainous regions of Colombia. A small photograph taken of de Amaral in 1969 is reproduced in the exhibition catalogue and shows her perched on a rock with a ruined citadel and rocky mountain behind her. The architectonic nature of the ruins could have provided inspiration for one of the cartographic textile renderings exhibited in the exhibition.
Marie Perennès: “Olga is fascinated by the mountains in Bogota. We tried to recreate that mineral landscape in the exhibition, and the feeling she got from her work in the 1980s when she used to photograph her work on rocks and include it in nature directly. So, we worked with French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh on the scenography. She did the Serpentine Pavilion last year.”
Olga de Amaral Installation image. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
Olga de Amaral Installation image. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
On the below-ground level, Ghotmeh has created a scenography based on the spiral motif found in some of Amaral’s works, designed so that visitors discover her enigmatic artworks hanging from the ceiling or hovering ghost-like above the ground as they follow a loose path through an enveloping space created by dramatic lighting and dark walls.
Lina Ghotmeh explains her approach to the exhibition’s scenography in the catalogue: “In designing the exhibition, I thought about space, that of Amaral’s pieces and that of Jean Nouvel’s building. How to elevate the relationship between them? I used architecture as a tool. The aim was to evoke an emotion in visitors, to create a timeless moment and to immerse them in the atmosphere and memory of the works with the least possible number of elements and devices.”
While the ‘Bruma’ artworks are suspended in the upstairs gallery like so many rain clouds, downstairs there is an abundance of golden fiber artworks displayed in darkened galleries, creating the effect of a journey from sunrise to sunset. There is a more reverential, Church-like feel in the lower ground floor galleries which evokes Amaral’s Catholic upbringing in Colombia. The gold leaf artworks have the aesthetic of Byzantine or Renaissance altarpieces.
Visitors to the exhibition might feel immersed in Olga’s work upstairs due to its vast scale and the huge glass walls of the galleries. In the subterranean galleries where the walls are covered in an earthen tone of rendered gesso, a more spiritual or intimate experience is offered, with a path weaving through the hanging pieces, dramatically lit to create shadows and displaying work from the 1960s through to 2020.
Marie Perennès: “We worked with Lina again on the lower ground galleries, and we were inspired by the idea of the spiral that often exists in Olga’s work. It allows us to enter deeper into her work, her obsession and experimentation.”
Some of the pieces have a cartographical feel, with one resembling an aerial view of golden cornfields and another like scorched brown earth. De Amaral’s touch and vision is so magical that she can even make rubbish look beautiful. This is proven by a tall white hanging sculpture made from discarded plastic bags found in Amaral’s studio. Created back in 1969, years before people started to be more conscious of the detrimental effect of plastics on our planet, the artwork was a resourceful use of discarded materials demonstrating how ahead of the curve Amaral was by recycling such ordinary throwaway objects into a beautiful work of art.
Marie Perennès: “This is a plastic artwork made in 1969 at a time where she couldn’t find any material in Bogota because exportation was difficult, so she tried to use what she had in the studio, which in this case was plastic bags, and she made this. At that time, it was so modern to use plastic, which for us today is so much associated with pollution.”
Amaral’s work is multi-layered with multiple references, and the gold textile works combine the Japanese technique of kintsugi with a nod to pre-Columbian gold, her Catholic upbringing, and the altarpieces of the Catholic Church built by the Spanish when they arrived in Bogota in the early 16th Century.
Olga de Amaral Installation image. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
Olga de Amaral Installation image. Photograph Courtesy of Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain.
The final room of the exhibition features a group of golden tablets made with gold thread and gesso, suspended from the ceiling in a darkened semi-circular room. The tablets are elevated from the floor and appear to float like golden angels. Displayed in a cocoon-like space, the tablets are golden on one side and black on the other, perhaps metaphors for day and night, good and evil or ying and yang. Experiencing this final room is something of a spiritual experience, creating a meditative effect on a par with the contemplation of Rothko’s ‘Seagram Murals’.
Olga de Amaral says in the exhibition catalogue: “As I build surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection. Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant but is also deeply resonant of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element.”
I’d love to know what’s going on in Amaral’s head when she’s creating these different cartographies or journeys. She is fully immersed when creating the artworks. Although the artworks are abstract, they feel like they have some sort of narrative, and they emit magnetic, spiritual energy which is perhaps the spirit of the artist herself, the spirit of Bogota.
Fondation Cartier Press Officer Sophie Lawani-Wesley said as we contemplated the golden tablets: “The hands create the art, but the mind and spirit are channelled through the hands. The energy and movement of her hands is present in the artworks. The monumentality and size of some of the pieces requires an involvement of the body. This is also very visible and strong in her work. The engagement of the hand, body and mind.”
This exhibition is a fusion of colour and textile, geometry and abstraction, and a deeply contemplative and meditative experience which succeeds in elevating textile art to the status of a fine art.
Marie Perennès: “Making textile part of contemporary art history, and to emancipate it from something very minor in the hierarchy of the medium for les beaux arts. I think she succeeded in a way that you cannot tell it’s textile if you don’t know it. It’s really totally abstract.”
Olga de Amaral is at Fondation Cartier, Paris until March 2025.
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Publish date : 2024-10-29 00:49:00
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