For decades, Olga de Amaral has created works in fiber that have a certain presence to them. Whether they are just a few inches tall or more than 11 feet, hanging from the ceiling or cascading onto the floor, there’s a certain heftiness and monumentality to her work: threads here are no longer easy to overlook. Instead, they are the source of endless possibilities and delight.
Amaral’s career retrospective at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, on view through March 17, features more than 80 of the textile-based works she’s been making since the mid-1960s. On the ground floor, visitors are greeted with dozens of Amaral’s eye-catching mature works, separated into two installations. But to understand how Amaral got there, it’s essential to see her earlier tactile experiments by descending into the basement level, which architect Lina Ghotmeh has transformed into a chasm meant to mimic a night sky, with elliptical-shaped galleries and unfinished walls that are meant to be touched.
In this void of textured spackle, Amaral’s colorful tapestries—in warm and vibrant shades of red, orange, pink, purple, silver, copper, and gold—glow with saturation. Take Elementos rojo en fuego (Red elements on fire), from 1973/1981, an eight-foot-tall work made of various squares of crimson, ochre, marigold, and magenta woven into a grid. No two sections are alike; it’s as if you’re witnessing a massive fire as it crackles and sets the night ablaze.
Nearby are works that show Amaral’s diverse approaches when it comes to fiber, including weaving, braiding, and knotting. The fuchsia and purple bundles of cords that comprise Naturaleza mora (1979) are paired with layered swatches of purple and orange fabric in Encalado en laca azul (1976). Her relentless experimentation betrays the endless ways one might combine countless threads, minute things we encounter so ordinarily that we can forget the labor and craft behind them. Other works hang in the center of the room, their backsides revealed, offering insight into how Amaral constructs her complex configurations: we see the shimmering gold in one sun-like work intricately stitched onto a backing of royal blue waves.
While her work conversed with modernist pictorial strategies—like color field painting and geometric abstraction—Amaral also looked at pre-Columbian knowledge and artifacts, including quipus and stelae, to develop her own language of abstraction, unique for its emphasis on materiality. Her works have taken the forms of quipus and stelae, which recorded the histories of their eras, yet her references remain enigmatic, and not for us to ever decode.
Back on the ground floor, a thematic grouping of works from 1976 to 1992 titled “Weaving the Landscape” highlights Amaral’s attempts to portray the vistas she saw in Colombia. She chased the ways they changed as the sun shifted along its daily route, and those layers of history were brewing beneath the surface. Ghotmeh has placed several rocks around these sculptures to bring that landscape into the space.
The grand finale is one of Amaral’s most recent series, “Brumas” (Mists), begun in 2013. Thousands of brightly dyed strips of linen float throughout the gallery, hung from the ceiling and forming triangular volumes. Shapes—circles, triangles, rectangles—are hand-painted in acrylic across strands, emerging near each works’ center. They look as if a breath might disturb them, yet the strands don’t seem to move, hanging there like a thick fog—rendering a humble thread bold and monumental.
