Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock

Olga de Amaral (b. 1932 in Bogotá) is one of the world’s most distinguished textile artists. After studying in the United States, among other places, and returning to Colombia, she developed the visual idiom that she is known for today by experimenting with braiding, winding and coiling as well as manipulating warps, with the artisanal fundamentals of weaving providing the starting point for her sculptural explorations. Colour, structure, process and materiality always play a central role. The Colombian landscape, pre-Columbian textiles and the basketry of indigenous peoples are for her as much an inspiration as the principals of abstract geometry. Gold and silver leaf and acrylic paint are found over and again in Amaral’s textural works, which she creates from such woven  materials as silk, cotton, horsehair or linen. Moreover, she often weaves in bristles and strands of hair in order to create an all-over texture to her colour compositions.

On a conceptual level Olga de Amaral repeatedly examined questions of materiality and space which coincided with contemporary discourses in painting, sculpture, installation art and Land Art. Thus in the late 1960s, she experimented with synthetic materials in the series Luz (Light), using columns or cascades of layered polyurethane the size of walls alongside plastic panels. In the 1970s she caused a sensation when she created several outdoor installations in which wool and horsehair disappeared like camouflage into the rock formations of the Colombian landscape.