Olga de Amaral

Olga de Amaral (born 1932[1]) 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.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.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.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.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."[10] 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.[12] This ability to connect the ancient and the contemporary[10] 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.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."[13] 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.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.[15] 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".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.[17] 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.(…) 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 the 1980s Olga de Amaral started the following series: Riscos, Tejidos policromos, Tierras, Tablas, Entornos, Cestas lunares, Lienzos ceremoniales, Alquimias and Montañas.The pieces in the Riscos series are mostly rectangular forms and in contrast with the vertical chained, undulated braids that hang from top to bottom, they create a sense of movement, a nearly kinetic effect.Each piece within its unique composition studies textural and chromatic shifts on the woven surfaces (each cotton fiber is coated with gesso and paint), where the geometric images emerge - the circle of sun and moon, the arc and swirl of energies and water.The pieces from this series express feelings that arose when the artist saw the baskets made by the Yanomami, a tribe on the border between Venezuela and Brazil, also known as the Children of the Moon.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.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.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.Although the pieces in this series are rigid and immobile structures, they create vibrant, visually fluid surfaces through the use of silver or gold leaf that shade or reflect light.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.