page_title: Olga de Amaral
section_title: Early work from the 1960s
hierarchical_section_title: Olga de Amaral / Early work from the 1960s
caption_attribution_description: English: Entrelazado en naranja y gris «multicolor», 1969; 200 x 80 cm; wool, cotton and linen.
context_page_description: 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 currently lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.
context_section_description: The early period of de Amaral's oeuvre is characterised by visually relatively traditional tapestries, but already presenting the search for an individual language through formal experimentations. Since the mid60s, she worked mostly with hand-spun wool, cotton, linen, and dyes. Vivid colors and bold combinations and the exploration of the structure and edges of weaving characterize some of her small scale early work of this period. The geometric conception and composition of these works reveal a profound awareness and understanding of the modern artistic tendencies of the time, bringing to mind the De Stijl abstraction current among others.
  In 1966 the Amarals were invited by Miguel Arroyo to show their work at the Fine Arts Museum in Caracas, Venezuela. It was the first solo show by Olga de Amaral outside her native country. In 1967 Olga presented her work for the first time at the prominent Lausanne Biennale in Switzerland, the first out of six later appearances at that event. In 1969 Olga de Amaral took part in a collective exhibition of 27 fiber artists at MoMA New York entitled “Wall Hangings”. It was an international exhibition curated by an architecture and design curator Mildred Constantine organised with Jack Lenor Larsen and presented not in the architecture and design lobby as usual for the fiber artists, but in the art section of MoMA, that up until then was reserved only for painting or sculpture. This was the importance of that exhibition - it addressed the transformations in the medium of fiber art, noted differences between the continents and anticipated the experimentation to come.
  In the late 60's, with the creation of the piece Entrelazado en naranja, gris, multicolor (1969), de Amaral eventually "exploded the picture plane from inside out". At the end of this period, the artist left the fundamental concept of fabric weaving (the opposition between warp and weft), by leaving only the warp (in the form of braiding) and letting it float freely. The full form or volume stressed in the composition of the pieces from this period, make them look almost like thread sculptures. However, after this period of pushing the art of weaving to its boundaries, in the next decade, the issue of the flat surface will emerge again in de Amaral's art. Olga's massive hangings called Muros tejidos (Woven Walls), solid bulwarks built from stiff wool and horsehair, debuted at a solo exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York in 1970. In 1971 Olga took part in an exhibition "Deliberate Entanglements" at the University of California, Los Angeles organised by its art professor Bernard Kester. It showed American and Eastern European fiber art for the first time in Southern California. It reflected the era's revolutionary fiber sculpture, particularly its tendency towards monumentality. "When I started to show my work in Europe and the USA, it was considered art, not crafts. And it was then that I realised that it was not the weaving, but the visual quality that now mattered in my creations."
caption: Entrelazado en naranja y gris «multicolor», 1969; 200 x 80 cm; wool, cotton and linen.
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