Olga de Amaral

Colombia · b. 1932

Enter the viewing room →Exhibition: The Light of Spirit →

Olga de Amaral (Bogotá, 1932) is one of the most important Colombian artists of her generation. She studied architecture at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá (1951–1952) and then at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (1954–1955), where she discovered textile art in Marianne Strengell’s weaving workshop.

Since the 1960s she has worked with linen, cotton, horsehair, gesso, gold leaf and palladium, creating works that are at once painting, sculpture, installation and architecture. In the 1970s, through the ceramist Lucie Rie, she discovered kintsugi, the Japanese technique of repairing cracks with gold, and gold became one of her favourite materials.

Among her best-known series are the Estelas (begun in 1996), gilded stelae of cotton covered in gesso that evoke pre-Columbian artifacts, and the Brumas (begun in 2013), diaphanous, three-dimensional textiles with painted geometric patterns. Her works are in the collections of Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. She was named Visionary Artist by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (2005) and received the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2019).

In December 2018 we presented The Light of Spirit, her exhibition at Espace Expression in Miami.

Olga de Amaral at the Fondation Cartier, Paris

October 12th, 2024 – March 16th, 2025

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris dedicated to Olga de Amaral her first major retrospective in Europe. Nearly eighty works made from the 1960s to the present, many of them never shown outside Colombia, traced six decades of her practice.

Curated by Marie Perennès, the exhibition was staged by the French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, who created a landscape of slate stone on the ground floor and, below ground, used a spiral motif from Amaral’s work to guide visitors — an approach she calls an “archeology of the future”.

The retrospective then travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (May 1st – October 12th, 2025), organized with the Fondation Cartier.