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The Foundation Cartier pour l’art contemporary is presenting for the first time in Europe a major retrospective of Olga de Amaral.
A key figure on the Colombian art scene and in Fiber Art, she was born in Bogota in 1932.
After graduating in architecture from the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca (1951-1952), she continued her studies at the Cranbrook Academy in Michi- gan (1954-1955), in line with the teachings of the German Bauhaus.
She discovered textile art in the weaving workshop of Marianne Strengell, a Finnish-American artist and designer who favored weft over pattern.
The exhibition brings together nearly 90 works created between the 1960s and today.Her famous vibrant creations in gold leaf are displayed alongside her monumental abstract pieces and her early experimental textile research.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Olga de Amaral participated alongside Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz in the development of Fiber Art using new materials and new techniques borrowed from both modernist principles and popular traditions of Colombia. Far from walls and any categorization, her works are at once paintings, sculptures, installations and architectures.
At the surface of the soul and skin, they envelop the public in the intimate and sensory universe of this visionary artist.