Olga De Amaral

Place: Bogotá

Born: 1932

Biography:

Olga de Amaral is a Colombian visual artist known for her large-scale abstract works made with fibers and covered in gold and/or silver leaf. Because of her ability to reconcile local concerns with international developments, de Amaral became one of the few artists from South America to become internationally known for her work in fiber during the 1960s and ‘70s. She is also considered an important practitioner in the development of postwar Latin American Abstraction. She has developed a unique language with a diversity of vocabulary from weaving, painting, and sculptural traditions. Her works are owned by major museums throughout Europe, North, and South America, and also reside in distinguished corporate and private collections.
Olga de Amaral was born as Olga Ceballos Velez in Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia to parents from the Antioquia region of Colombia. She was raised in a traditional religious family with 5 sisters and 2 brothers. She grew up in a traditional neighbourhood in Bogotá in a warm, safe family atmosphere, maintaining a special relationship with her loving and caring mother. Upon graduating from high school, in the years 1951-52 she got a degree in Architectural Design at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá. After graduation, the future textile artist worked for a year as a director of the Architectural Drawing Faculty at the same school. In 1954, de Amaral went to the United States to study English in New York at the Columbia University. She then moved and studied fiber art at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, USA (1954–55). The artist cherishes that period of her education and considers it crucial for her later artistic development: "In Cranbrook, the textile workshop had eight looms placed against the windows: one of them, in the corner, would be my home for a year. There, I lived my most intimate moments of solitude; there was born my certainty about color; its strength; I felt as if I loved color as though it were something tangible. I also learned to speak in color. I remember with nostalgia that experience in which souls touched hands". At Cranbrook de Amaral met Jim Amaral and they became close friends. In 1955, after a year in Cranbrook, she returned to Colombia and started to make decorative textiles on commission for her architect friends. Meanwhile, Jim Amaral was in the U.S. Navy, on a base in the Philippines. In 1956, Jim visited Colombia to see Olga, initially for a few weeks. Shortly after, Jim Amaral and Olga Ceballos Velez married and settled in Bogotá. They started a family (children Diego and Andrea) and a workshop of handwoven textiles. During that period, Jack Lenor Larsen visited Colombia and the Amaral's workshop. He expressed interest in Olga's tapestries. Their professional and artistic relationship became crucial in projection of her work internationally in the world of contemporary tapestry. In 1965 de Amaral founded and taught at the Textile Department at the Universidad de los Andes (University of the Andes) in Bogotá.
In 1966-1967 the Amaral family lived in New York. There Olga de Amaral met Eileen Vanderbilt from the World Crafts Council and became its representative for Colombia. With Jack Lenor Larsen's collaboration, Olga de Amaral displayed her tapestries in New York (solo exhibition in Jack Lenor Larsen’s New York showroom in 1967), taught at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and in Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. After returning to Colombia, the Amarals travelled to Popayán and Tierradentro region with its must-see San Agustín. Later Olga visited Peru as the WCC representative. On a rapid visit to Ireland to participate in a WCC conference, Olga met Lucie Rie, a British ceramist who inspired her to incorporate gold into the tapestries. At the beginning of the seventies, the Amarals moved to Barcelona and then to Paris. They visited Greece, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, and England. They made contacts with the centres of European art. They lived for a time in Europe, then returned to Bogotá, visited different areas of Colombia, and then went back to France, amid exhibits, work, and new friendships. Another important journey for the artist was her travel to Japan. Nowadays Olga de Amaral lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.
"I am not familiar with current tendencies in textile design. It seems to me that those who weave artistically base themselves only partially on fiber craft, which in my opinion, makes no sense. I consider that one must base oneself on precision, on mathematics, on color theory. What is woven, does not occur by chance, but totally the opposite - it is very calculated. I can't do that because I am not trained and because I am in the midst of an abstraction. Finally, my work is nothing more than my way of telling how I feel about life, about the soul of things." What has driven the art of Olga de Amaral from its beginnings has been the creation of works that redefine our notions of unity, concept, representation, and personal expression. De Amaral explores and revisits ideas, techniques, and processes, looking for subtle and intricate variations within her own artistic process. She is an important figure among a globally dispersed group of artists who are deconstructing and rethinking the structure, surface, and support of painting by adding sculptural dimensions and atypical materials. Her work takes the elements of painting off the stretcher and into space, approaching the problem of the superposition, of layering in a painting form the point of view of the material itself - the painting's support, the canvas, the fabric or texture.

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