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拍品專文
“These woven fragments are the ‘words’ I use to begin creating landscapes of surfaces, textures, emotions, memories, meanings, and connections…” - Olga de Amaral
A pioneering fiber artist, Olga de Amaral has long plied woven strips of linen and cotton into sumptuous, sculptural tapestries laced with gold. Trained as an architect in her native Colombia, Amaral studied weaving under the noted textile designer Marianne Strengell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan) in 1954-55. Her first hangings, walls of loosely interlaced weavings, appeared a decade later and brought her to the forefront of modern textile art. The Museum of Modern Art included her in the watershed exhibition, Wall Hangings (1969), alongside such artists as Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks. The additions of plaster, gesso, plastic, paint, and her signature gold leaf brought new tactile and spatial dimensions to later weavings like Pueblo H, inviting associations with place, process, and abstraction. In 2024, Amaral participated in the LX Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and opened her first major European retrospective, organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris). A new exhibition, organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York) and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), will debut in 2026.
“These woven fragments are the ‘words’ I use to begin creating landscapes of surfaces, textures, emotions, memories, meanings, and connections,” Amaral once explained. “As I build these surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection.” She began to incorporate gold into her practice after a visit to the studio of British potter Lucie Rie in 1970 and her subsequent purchase of a vase that had been mended with gold using the Japanese technique of kintsugi. “She considered fixing to be an act of love and respect,” Amaral recalled. “This use of gold touched a mysterious place in my mind. . . . From then on, gold became an important material in my work. My search centered on how I could turn textile into golden surfaces of light” (The House of My Imagination: Lecture by Olga de Amaral at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 24, 2003, Bogotá, 2003, pp. 7-8).
Amaral’s gilded tapestries nod to “the ancestral intelligence —the unconscious high mathematics—present in everything textile in ancient Andean culture,” and she emphasizes the material and conceptual values—“the texture of time”—embedded in their layers of fiber, pigment, and gold. In Pueblo H, which can be hung in either a landscape or portrait orientation, the integration of different weave patterns creates a swirling sensation of volume that ripples across its gilded surface, revealing the tactile geometry and topology of warp and weft. Subtle hints of marine blue can be see flickering from underneath the gilded surface. The Pueblo series is notable within Amaral’s oeuvre for the distinctly humanist metaphor of its title, which suggests the inhabitation—and the inhabitants—of the land. “The titles of these surfaces help evoke the basic ideas that brought them forth,” she allows, and here the weaving becomes a metaphor for “pueblo,” its various whorls and weaves an abstraction of a diverse people and their place in the world. “Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but is also deeply resonant of the whole,” Amaral reflects. “Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element” (ibid., pp. 8-10).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
A pioneering fiber artist, Olga de Amaral has long plied woven strips of linen and cotton into sumptuous, sculptural tapestries laced with gold. Trained as an architect in her native Colombia, Amaral studied weaving under the noted textile designer Marianne Strengell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan) in 1954-55. Her first hangings, walls of loosely interlaced weavings, appeared a decade later and brought her to the forefront of modern textile art. The Museum of Modern Art included her in the watershed exhibition, Wall Hangings (1969), alongside such artists as Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks. The additions of plaster, gesso, plastic, paint, and her signature gold leaf brought new tactile and spatial dimensions to later weavings like Pueblo H, inviting associations with place, process, and abstraction. In 2024, Amaral participated in the LX Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and opened her first major European retrospective, organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris). A new exhibition, organized by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York) and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis), will debut in 2026.
“These woven fragments are the ‘words’ I use to begin creating landscapes of surfaces, textures, emotions, memories, meanings, and connections,” Amaral once explained. “As I build these surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection.” She began to incorporate gold into her practice after a visit to the studio of British potter Lucie Rie in 1970 and her subsequent purchase of a vase that had been mended with gold using the Japanese technique of kintsugi. “She considered fixing to be an act of love and respect,” Amaral recalled. “This use of gold touched a mysterious place in my mind. . . . From then on, gold became an important material in my work. My search centered on how I could turn textile into golden surfaces of light” (The House of My Imagination: Lecture by Olga de Amaral at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 24, 2003, Bogotá, 2003, pp. 7-8).
Amaral’s gilded tapestries nod to “the ancestral intelligence —the unconscious high mathematics—present in everything textile in ancient Andean culture,” and she emphasizes the material and conceptual values—“the texture of time”—embedded in their layers of fiber, pigment, and gold. In Pueblo H, which can be hung in either a landscape or portrait orientation, the integration of different weave patterns creates a swirling sensation of volume that ripples across its gilded surface, revealing the tactile geometry and topology of warp and weft. Subtle hints of marine blue can be see flickering from underneath the gilded surface. The Pueblo series is notable within Amaral’s oeuvre for the distinctly humanist metaphor of its title, which suggests the inhabitation—and the inhabitants—of the land. “The titles of these surfaces help evoke the basic ideas that brought them forth,” she allows, and here the weaving becomes a metaphor for “pueblo,” its various whorls and weaves an abstraction of a diverse people and their place in the world. “Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but is also deeply resonant of the whole,” Amaral reflects. “Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element” (ibid., pp. 8-10).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park