OLGA DE AMARAL, FONDATION CARTIER, PARIS
OLGA DE AMARAL
THE FONDATION CARTIERPARIS
From 12 Octobre 2024 to 16 March 2025Curator; Marine PerennèsArchitect of the exhibition; Lina GhotmehReported by; Nazli Kok Akbas 8 February 2025,Paris
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.Estelas, Olga de Amaral, Estelas are breathtakingly beautiful, they take the form of gilded stelae composed of a rigid woven cotton structure covered in a thick layer of gesso, than acrylic paint and gold leaf concealing all trace of the fabrication.
Olga de Amaral at Casa Amara, Bogota, Colombia, 2005Photo Diego Amaral
"As I build these surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation and reflection. Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but is also deeply resonant of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element. Tapestry, fibers, strands, units, cords, all are transparent layers with their own meanings, revealing and hiding each other to make one presence, one tone that steaks about the texture of time."*
*From her speach during a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2003.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Despite her international fame, Amaral's work has rarely been shown in Europe. The Olga de Amaral exhibition at the Cartier Foundation is the first retrospective of her work in Europe. It brings together nearly eighty works from the 1960s to the present day, many of which have never been shown outside Colombia.In addition to the vibrant gold leaf pieces for which the artist is famous, the exhibition reveals her earliest explorations and experiments with textiles, as well as her monumental works.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Landscape and color as languages.
Amaral is a key figure in fiber art and Colombian art. Fiber art is an artistic movement that began in the 1960s and emancipated the textile medium from decorative, narrative tapestries to new monumental sculptural dimensions.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Olga de Amaral was born Olga Ceballos Veles in 1932 in Bogota, Colombia, where she still lives and works. She studied architectural drawing in Bogota before leaving for the USA in 1952 to study textiles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. During her year at the Cranbrook Academy (1954-1955) in the USA, Amaral developed a deep interest in colour and undertook radical experiments with material, composition and geometry.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.On her return to Colombia in 1955, she combined the techniques she had learnt with her knowledge of the traditional textiles of her country in a spontaneous, expressive style inspired by the history and landscapes of her homeland: the Andean highlands, the valleys and the vast tropical plains from which her works drew form and colour.
Olga de Amaral at Casa Amara, Bogota, Colombia, 2005
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Despite her international fame, Amaral's work has rarely been shown in Europe. The Olga de Amaral exhibition at the Cartier Foundation is the first retrospective of her work in Europe. It brings together nearly eighty works from the 1960s to the present day, many of which have never been shown outside Colombia.
In addition to the vibrant gold leaf pieces for which the artist is famous, the exhibition reveals her earliest explorations and experiments with textiles, as well as her monumental works.
Landscape and color as languages.
Amaral is a key figure in fiber art and Colombian art. Fiber art is an artistic movement that began in the 1960s and emancipated the textile medium from decorative, narrative tapestries to new monumental sculptural dimensions.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Olga de Amaral was born Olga Ceballos Veles in 1932 in Bogota, Colombia, where she still lives and works. She studied architectural drawing in Bogota before leaving for the USA in 1952 to study textiles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. During her year at the Cranbrook Academy (1954-1955) in the USA, Amaral developed a deep interest in colour and undertook radical experiments with material, composition and geometry.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
On her return to Colombia in 1955, she combined the techniques she had learnt with her knowledge of the traditional textiles of her country in a spontaneous, expressive style inspired by the history and landscapes of her homeland: the Andean highlands, the valleys and the vast tropical plains from which her works drew form and colour.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.Lina Ghotmeh is the architect of the exhibition, on the main floor she has arranged Olga's works around these large stones, originally from a quarry in the Pyrenees in the south of France.
Without adopting a strict chronological order, the exhibition highlights the different periods that have marked her artistic career: from her formal explorations (use of the grid, colours) to her experiments (with materials and scale), as well as the influences that have nourished her work (Constructivist art, Latin American handicrafts, pre-Columbian era).The exhibition basement is a much more intimate space with smaller works. The spiral motif, a symbol of fertility, life and death, is very common in Olga's work. This spiral allows visitors to gradually enter Olga's explorations and obsessions in search of beauty.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.Amaral's work also refers to the religious and ceremonial dimensions given to gold by the pre-Columbian worship of the substance, especially in her Alquimia (Alchemy) works, begun in 1984, which reclaim the notion of a material indelibly linked to the sun and the earth, but also plundered from her country over many centuries.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.The Colombian artist's work spans more than 60 years and goes back even further, to the spiritual qualities and ancient iconography of the Middle Ages, or to the rigour and simplicity of the modernist grid, as if woven on a loom.
The Colombian artist's work spans more than 60 years and goes back even further, to the spiritual qualities and ancient iconography of the Middle Ages, or to the rigour and simplicity of the modernist grid, as if woven on a loom.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Her technique is very unusual; she uses the loom to make small strips and then assembles them. The first room of the exhibition shows the monumental works of her art, firmly rooted in the Andean landscape, the mountain range that crosses Latin America, including Colombia, and which has strongly influenced Olga. The technique is reminiscent of the brick architecture of Bogota and the colours are poetic evocations of Colombian nature, the autumn light and falling leaves.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved. Amaral's travels in the 1950s and 60s are reflected in her wide range of international influences. For example, after an encounter with the Japanese technique of 'kintsugi' at the ceramics studio of British potter Lucie Rie in 1970, Amaral began a series of 'Fragmentos Completos' (Complete Fragments), using gold leaf layered and woven into the fabric of her hand-woven textiles.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Her technique is very unusual; she uses the loom to make small strips and then assembles them. The first room of the exhibition shows the monumental works of her art, firmly rooted in the Andean landscape, the mountain range that crosses Latin America, including Colombia, and which has strongly influenced Olga. The technique is reminiscent of the brick architecture of Bogota and the colours are poetic evocations of Colombian nature, the autumn light and falling leaves.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Developing her own tools and techniques, Amaral relies on the hand for her strip-woven expanses of wool, linen and cotton, but she has also knotted masses of horsehair together and supported her fabric works with a painterly application of gesso or stucco, often highlighting the reverse or foregrounding the edges.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.This exhibition is particularly important for the Cartier Foundation as it is the last to be held in the Jean Nouvel building at 281 boulevard Raspail.
Olga de Amaral's exhibition, which focuses on memory, temporality, the link with the land and cultural traditions, and the constant search for beauty, is a wonderful tribute to the Cartier Foundation and its programmes in this space.
Photography copyright ,Nazli Kok Akbas NKA Art Reports Switzerland-France-Istanbul Photography 2024. All rights reserved.
Estelas, wiev from the back.(NKA Photography )
"I live color. I know it’s an unconscious language, and I understand it. Color is like a friend, it accompanies me"
Olga de Amaral
Nazli Kok Akbas Art Reports, February 8, Paris
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