THE MONUMENTALITY OF THREAD: OLGA DE AMARAL AT MALBA

Malba inaugurates the celebrations of its 25th anniversary with the first major anthological retrospective of the work of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral in Latin America. Open until May 11, the exhibition proposes an ambitious survey of her practice, spanning from the 1960s to the early 2000s and encompassing key stages of her artistic development, including the series Entrelazados, Muros tejidos, Estelas, and Brumas.

Olga de Amaral: Textile Body is curated by María Amalia García and Marie Perennès. More than fifty works from both public and private collections in Bogotá, Medellín, and New York make up this six-decade journey, offering visitors the opportunity to explore a body of work characterized by intense visual richness and material experimentation. Her positioning within contemporary art renders obsolete questions surrounding the artistic status of textile art.

Her monumental works detach from the wall and defy categorization: they are simultaneously paintings, sculptures, environments, and architectures. The ancient textile traditions of Andean communities and the vernacular dimension of materials—such as wool or horsehair—are present in Amaral’s work from a contemporary perspective that interrogates spatiality and the body. In this sense, her work is not anchored to a specific geography; rather, it activates symbolic dimensions that evoke the anthropological significance of textiles in relation to the development of humanity.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication of an extensive catalogue that, for the first time, makes available archival material related to Amaral’s career and the local and international circulation of her work. Her fashion design projects—most notably the renowned mantas guajiras—will also be presented for the first time. The research aims to situate the artist within her contexts, documenting her artistic networks, her architectural interventions, and her pioneering role in textile practice in the Americas.

The exhibition has been developed in collaboration with Casa Amaral and Marie Perennès, curator of the artist’s exhibition at the Fondation Cartier (Paris, 2024).

Olga de Amaral was born as Olga Ceballos Vélez in Bogotá, Colombia, on June 14, 1932, where she continues to live. She studied Architectural Drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá and moved to the United States in 1952 to study textiles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, Michigan. During the 1960s she taught at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and participated in the group exhibition Wall Hangings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before presenting a solo exhibition titled Woven Walls at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 1970.

After living in Barcelona and Paris in the early 1970s, she returned to Colombia. She later represented her country at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and received her first major retrospective in Colombia at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá in 1993. De Amaral has presented nearly one hundred solo exhibitions and participated in more than one hundred group exhibitions at renowned institutions worldwide. Her work is held in twenty-four permanent collections, including the Banco de la República Art Collection, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art.