OLGA DE AMARAL
Foundation Cartier
Paris
Until March 16th, 2025
I had to sit, I had to take a rest, I had to try to take it all in. I was moving through Colombian artist Olga de Amaral’s exhibition at the Cartier Foundation, the lower floor of which featured dozens of her artistic explorations and I was at some point significantly overwhelmed by de Amaral’s seemingly limitless ability to form raw material into objects of stunning gorgeousness. With subtlety and with scale, with colours that so perfectly complement each other, I was in the midst of a life’s work that was altogether breathtaking in its breadth, skill, dare and audacity. I have never seen anything even remotely like it.
As I sat, quietly discussing all of this with Mrs Champion, (she never ever calls herself that) a middle aged (apologies if this description does not fit you whoever you were) American woman sitting nearby said, “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation and I wanted to add my feeling too, of hushed awe at a whole life dedicated to the creation of so much beauty.”
“I discovered the color, texture, structure of the world of fabric. In a context so rich in possibilities, I learned how to approach that world in a contemporary fashion.” Olga de Amaral
Olga de Amaral is 93 years old now. She was born in Bogota in 1932. She studied textile arts in the US in the 1050s before returning to Colombia and establishing a textile business with her husband, the Portuguese-American artist Jim Amaral.
Olga has history with Paris, having lived and worked here on becoming a Guggenheim Fellow in the 1970s. Paris also hosted her first solo show at La Demeure - at that moment, the world's leading gallery for twentieth century textile art.
In some respects their could not be a more perfect venue for Olga de Amaral’s retrospective, dating from thee 1960s, than Foundation Cartier, itself an architectural artwork, an invocation of modernism in acres of glass and steel. It lets the light in. Nowhere is this more impactful than when in the presence of Amaral’s Brumas, epic clouds of layered shimmering gossamer, blending modernism and tradition in fabric that moves as you move around it. Many of the pieces at the Cartier Foundation have never been seen outside Colombia before now.
The Olga de Amaral exhibition ran until March 16th, 2025, so… Yep, as ever, I saw it so late I think they were already sending for the shipping crates… But if you ever get an opportunity to see her work it simply redefines with a radiance, what fabric can do and be.
Essential Information
Exhibition web page at Foundation Cartier here
