Olga de Amaral

A major retrospective of pioneering fiber artist Olga de Amaral (b. 1932, Bogotá, Colombia) opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) this spring, bringing together over 50 works from six decades, and featuring recent and historical examples, some of which have never been presented outside of her home country. Presented in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, Olga de Amaral reveals the breadth and complexity of the artist’s practice, highlighting crucial periods in the development of her career as she moved from colorful explorations of the grid to experiments with materiality and scale. On view May 1 through October 12, the Miami presentation is organized by former Fondation Cartier curator Marie Perennès and Stephanie Seidel, ICA Miami’s Monica and Blake Grossman Curator, after a tremendous success at the Fondation Cartier.

Amaral’s sculptures and installations push the boundaries of fiber art, often combining weaving, knotting, and braiding to create striking abstract three-dimensional forms. Her earliest explorations, from the 1960s, frequently take inspiration from nature and feature unconventional weaving techniques. During the 1970s, Amaral created a group of monumental wall works; superimposing constructed layers of wool and horsehair enabled her to work at scale, evoking brick walls, leaves, and geological layers. Her investigations would also lead her to experiment with paint, linen, cotton, gesso, gold leaf, and palladium.

Complicating narratives of modernism and craft, Amaral’s unique sculptural language draws from Bauhaus Modernism and Constructivism along with pre-Columbian art and Indigenous weaving traditions. The exhibition includes the artist’s Estelas (1996–2018), vibrant goldleaf works that refract and absorb light, which recall pre-Columbian gold work reminiscent of funerary sculptures of pre-Hispanic archaeological sites. Works from Amaral’s most recent series, the cloudlike Brumas (2013–2018), are suspended from the ceiling. Brumas imbues geometric modernisms with the rich history and variety of landscape.

The exhibition also features a group of the artist’s largest works including El Gran muro (1976), which was originally installed as a six-story tall piece for the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta by the architect John Portman. This piece emphasizes the architectural quality of textiles as walls and resonates with Amaral’s breakthrough exhibition Woven Walls in 1970 at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York (now Museum of Arts and Design). A variety of smaller to medium scale works from as early as 1968, and as late as 2020, demonstrate Amaral’s inventiveness in her weaving process, on and off the loom, that challenge the conventions of fiber art.

Lina Ghotmeh, founder of Paris based international practice, Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture, led the exhibition design for both the Paris and Miami exhibitions. To design the exhibition space at ICA Miami, Ghotmeh immersed herself in Amaral’s sources of inspiration, this time embracing the unique setting of the museum’s third floor, which overlooks the canopy of trees. Seeking to extend this landscape into the exhibition, she has envisioned a vertical forest, where the works appear to grow organically within the gallery. The spiral motif, a recurring element in Amaral’s work, once again serves as a guiding structure, leading visitors through an enveloping space in which the artist’s explorations gradually emerge.

“Olga de Amaral’s bold and cutting-edge practice transcends and transforms the possibilities of textiles through innovative scales and alternative materials that defy categorization. This exhibition asserts her role as a key voice and influence in Postwar Latin American abstraction. Her exploration of materiality and three-dimensional space coincided with the expanding field of painting and sculpture within the global trajectory of contemporary art,” said Stephanie Seidel, Monica and Blake Grossman Curator, ICA Miami.

“A critical focus of ICA Miami’s exhibitions program is to platform artists across generations who are innovative, boundary-breaking voices, and to provide new perspectives on their work. We are pleased to collaborate with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain on this sweeping retrospective that provides a holistic view of Amaral’s important contributions,” said ICA Miami’s Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director, Alex Gartenfeld.