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Ensayo del lote
A pioneering fiber artist, Olga de Amaral has long plied woven strips of linen and cotton into sumptuous, sculptural tapestries laced with gold. Trained as an architect in her native Colombia, Amaral studied weaving under the noted textile designer Marianne Strengell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan) in 1954-55. Her first hangings, walls of loosely interlaced weavings, appeared a decade later and brought her to the forefront of modern textile art. The Museum of Modern Art included her in the watershed exhibition, Wall Hangings (1969), alongside such artists as Anni Albers and Sheila Hicks.
Amaral’s gilded tapestries nod to “the ancestral intelligence —the unconscious high mathematics—present in everything textile in ancient Andean culture,” and she emphasizes the material and conceptual values—“the texture of time”—embedded in their layers of fiber, pigment, and gold (The House of My Imagination: Lecture by Olga de Amaral at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 April 2003, Bogotá, 2003, pp. 8-10).
In Dos mitades III, the diptych’s divisions are not simply breaks in the surface, but intervals across which the eye seeks continuity, bringing separate parts into relation. The sweeping rhythmic changes and intermittent appearances of deep marine blue beneath the gold intensifies the interplay of light, color and movement. Gold, further, makes this carefully assembled structure responsive to light, transforming the material substance of the textile into something less fixed and tangible. The work invites the sustained attention Amaral describes as “meditation, contemplation, and reflection” — an encounter in which the patient accumulation of small woven units becomes a means of contemplating the relationship between fragment and whole, memories and time (Ibid, pp. 7-8).
Amaral began to incorporate gold into her practice after a visit to the studio of British potter Lucie Rie in 1970 and her subsequent purchase of a vase that had been mended with gold using the Japanese technique of kintsugi. “She considered fixing to be an act of love and respect,” Amaral recalls. “This use of gold touched a mysterious place in my mind. . . . From then on, gold became an important material in my work. My search centered on how I could turn textile into golden surfaces of light” (Ibid, pp. 7-8).
“These woven fragments are the ‘words’ I use to begin creating landscapes of surfaces, textures, emotions, memories, meanings, and connections,” Amaral explains. “As I build these surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection.” “Tapestry, fibers, strands, units, cords, all are transparent layers with their own meanings, revealing each other to make one presence, one tone that talks about the texture of time,” Amaral allows. “Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but it is also deeply resonant of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element” (ibid, pp. 8-10).
For the consignors of this work, this sentiment speaks to a profound family inspiration: the wife’s mother was an award-winning quilt maker, and it was her example, a lifetime spent joining small units into a larger whole, that led the couple to acquire Dos Mitades III.
Amaral’s work has reached new, global audiences over the past five years, beginning with the major retrospective, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, which opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in July 2021. In 2024, she participated in the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and opened her first major European retrospective, organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris) in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, where it traveled the following year. Olga de Amaral: Weaving the Infinite, organized by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, opened in St. Louis in September 2026 and will travel to New York next year.
Amaral’s gilded tapestries nod to “the ancestral intelligence —the unconscious high mathematics—present in everything textile in ancient Andean culture,” and she emphasizes the material and conceptual values—“the texture of time”—embedded in their layers of fiber, pigment, and gold (The House of My Imagination: Lecture by Olga de Amaral at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 24 April 2003, Bogotá, 2003, pp. 8-10).
In Dos mitades III, the diptych’s divisions are not simply breaks in the surface, but intervals across which the eye seeks continuity, bringing separate parts into relation. The sweeping rhythmic changes and intermittent appearances of deep marine blue beneath the gold intensifies the interplay of light, color and movement. Gold, further, makes this carefully assembled structure responsive to light, transforming the material substance of the textile into something less fixed and tangible. The work invites the sustained attention Amaral describes as “meditation, contemplation, and reflection” — an encounter in which the patient accumulation of small woven units becomes a means of contemplating the relationship between fragment and whole, memories and time (Ibid, pp. 7-8).
Amaral began to incorporate gold into her practice after a visit to the studio of British potter Lucie Rie in 1970 and her subsequent purchase of a vase that had been mended with gold using the Japanese technique of kintsugi. “She considered fixing to be an act of love and respect,” Amaral recalls. “This use of gold touched a mysterious place in my mind. . . . From then on, gold became an important material in my work. My search centered on how I could turn textile into golden surfaces of light” (Ibid, pp. 7-8).
“These woven fragments are the ‘words’ I use to begin creating landscapes of surfaces, textures, emotions, memories, meanings, and connections,” Amaral explains. “As I build these surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection.” “Tapestry, fibers, strands, units, cords, all are transparent layers with their own meanings, revealing each other to make one presence, one tone that talks about the texture of time,” Amaral allows. “Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but it is also deeply resonant of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element” (ibid, pp. 8-10).
For the consignors of this work, this sentiment speaks to a profound family inspiration: the wife’s mother was an award-winning quilt maker, and it was her example, a lifetime spent joining small units into a larger whole, that led the couple to acquire Dos Mitades III.
Amaral’s work has reached new, global audiences over the past five years, beginning with the major retrospective, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, which opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in July 2021. In 2024, she participated in the Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and opened her first major European retrospective, organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris) in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, where it traveled the following year. Olga de Amaral: Weaving the Infinite, organized by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, opened in St. Louis in September 2026 and will travel to New York next year.