Textiles as language: Olga de Amaral at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain review

3 March 2025, by Dr Babette Radclyffe-Thomas

In this week’s blog, Costume Society News Editor Dr Babette Radclyffe-Thomas reviews the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporian’s current exhibition featuring textile artist Olga de Amaral.

The first major retrospective of textile artist Colombian artist Olga de Amaral (b.1932) has opened in Europe   and brings together 80 pieces of work, dating from the 1960s to the present day. Many of the works have never been shown outside of Colombia. 

Since the 1960s Olga de Amaral has been experimenting with materials, scale and techniques to create often large-scale, three-dimensional works with complex structures. She is one of the most important textile artists of her generation, was a pioneer of the Fiber Art movement that established textiles as a fine art medium in the 1960s. 

“I discovered the colour, texture, structure of the world of fabric. In a context so rich with possibilities, I learned how to approach that world in a contemporary fashion”.  

The exhibition was curated by Marie Perennès and designed by architect Lina Ghotmeh, who was keen to highlight Amaral’s relationship with nature, matter and light. The exhibition took almost three years to prepare and is the last exhibition to be shown in the Fondation Cartier’s current location so was particularly  poignant for the curatorial team.  

The exhibition is spread across two floors. On the ground floor monumental works are suspended in space surrounded by slate stones, evoking a notion that the pieces of work were located on a mineral and rocky landscape. Here several pieces are created using horsehair and rectangular strips of different lengths and thicknesses were stitched individually onto a cotton backing. On the other side of the ground floor, 24 pieces of Amaral’s  Brumas  (Mists) series, which started in 2013 and now numbers 34 pieces, are on display. Consisting of thousands of cotton threads coated with gesso and finished with acrylic paint, these brightly coloured works are suspended in the air, falling like a fine rain. Unlike her other work, which is woven, these cotton threads are coated.  

In the basement area, a more intimate route is offered as visitors traverse through various smaller scale pieces of work. The spiral motif, which is found in some of Amaral’s work was the inspiration for the layout of the first basement room where works of art form the path that visitors follow. Here, the exhibition is organised chronologically and thematically including the legacy of Modernism and the Bauhaus, experiments with techniques and materials, the pursuit of light, textiles as a language, and finally, the kinship with the natural world.  

The first section, the legacy of modernism, explores Amaral’s discovery of textile design and weaving while studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in 1954. At this time, she began to create complex weaving structures such as Entrelazados (Interlaced) comprising woven strips of different colours and varying thicknesses. In the 1970s, Amaral experimented with new materials such as horsehair, linen and plastic.  

One of the major innovations in Amaral’s aesthetic was the use of gold as gold leaf became one of her preferred materials, either applied to cotton threads or directly to the surface of works. The use of gilding in her textiles evokes Pre-Columbian goldworking and its sacred connotations.  

Notably, the words text and textile share the same etymological root, the Latin texere, which means both to weave and tell. This hybridity is clear in Amaral’s works such as  Escrito  (Writing) and  Tablas (Tables) that evoke the idea of transcribing the memory of a person, an era or an empire, into textiles.  

The final room displays several pieces from her n Estelas series, gilded stelae made from a woven structure of very stiff cotton covered by a think layer of gesso followed by acrylic paint and gold leaf. Begun in 1996, the series now consists of 70 pieces and is reminiscent of the monumental funerary and votive sculptures found at the great Pre-Colombian archaeological sites.  

The exhibition runs until March 16, 2025.