Exhibitions
Olga de Amaral transforms textiles into a sensory and poetic experience
From February 27 to May 11, visitors can see "Textile Body ," an exhibition dedicated to the Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, which will open on Thursday, February 26 at 7:00 p.m. The exhibition offers an ambitious and essential retrospective of her career, spanning more than six decades of work, from her early investigations in the 1960s to the material explorations she developed in the early 2000s.
Through more than fifty works from public and private collections in Bogotá, Medellín, and New York, the project invites visitors into a universe where weaving transcends its artisanal dimension to become a plastic language, suspended architecture, and vibrant surface. Gold, natural fibers, pigments, and three-dimensional structures converse in a journey that highlights the constant formal and technical experimentation that has defined Olga de Amaral's practice.
Far from presenting a strictly chronological itinerary, Textile Body constructs a sensory experience that invites exploration of an artistic corpus of great visual intensity. From the earliest textile reliefs to the monumental pieces bathed in gold leaf, the exhibition reveals a persistent investigation into light, space, and materiality, solidifying Olga de Amaral as a key figure in the contemporary expansion of textile art.
Olga de Amaral's presence in contemporary art dissolves any doubt about the place of textiles within traditional hierarchies. In her work, fabric ceases to be a support or surface and becomes an event in itself. Her monumental pieces detach from the wall like luminous, floating skins: they are not merely paintings nor exclusively sculptures, but bodies that breathe in space, soft architectures that envelop and transform the viewer's gaze.
In them resonates the ancestral memory of Andean communities, where textiles were language, clothing, and cosmogony. Materials like wool or horsehair—humble, tactile, and brimming with life—acquire a symbolic density that transcends the vernacular. Amaral summons them from the present to question the relationship between space and body, between matter and light, between surface and depth.
Her work is not anchored to a specific geography; rather, it weaves a symbolic territory that connects times and cultures. Each fiber seems to contain a story, each weave evokes the anthropological dimension of textiles as one of humanity's foundational gestures: braiding, joining, building meaning from interlacing.
Developed in collaboration with Casa Amaral and Marie Perennes, curator of the artist's exhibition at the Cartier Foundation (Paris, 2024), this exhibition proposal expands that poetic and material constellation, inviting the viewer to inhabit the fabric not only with their gaze, but also with their memory and body.
