In London, a Spotlight on the Dreamlike Vision of Artist Olga de Amaral

For more than six decades, Olga de Amaral has blurred the lines between fiber art and fine art, carefully coloring, knotting, collaging, and alchemizing threads and textiles into paintings, sculptures, and majestic installations that play with texture and light.

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1932, de Amaral studied architectural drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in her hometown before being introduced to fiber as a medium in 1954, when she apprenticed with Finnish-American designer and textile connoisseur Marianne Strengell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. Since then, de Amaral has developed an oeuvre considered among the most important examples of post-war Latin American abstraction. In 1973, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship; she participated in the 1986 Venice Biennale; and her works are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Tate Collection in London. And now, at 90 years old, de Amaral’s creations are as current as ever.

On view at Lisson Gallery from September 23 to October 29, “Olga de Amaral” is the Colombian artist’s first solo show in London since 2015. Highlighting seminal works from the past two decades of her trailblazing career, the exhibition features iconic tapestries mingled with gesso, gold leaf, and palladium, as well as an array of oneiric three-dimensional installations de Amaral masterfully builds from thread.

“I let myself get carried away by dreams,” de Amaral says. “My mind follows these thoughts, these dreams I get until there’s an encounter. Let’s say I’m imagining something, and suddenly I kind of see an image, then I know I have to act to catch that dream, to prevent that dream from slipping away. It’s very abstract, but that’s what goes through my head,” she explains.

De Amaral has been based in her beloved Bogotá for most of her life, a city she says gives her a unique “sense of freedom, in the most profound sense of the word.” She has never considered living anywhere else, and for over 30 years, she has worked with the same seven female studio assistants who help to bring her unearthly creations to life.