Paris
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Olga de Amaral’s long overdue survey exhibition (on view at ICA Miami through October 12, 2025) reflects a recent wave of renewed interest in fiber art, as U.S. and European museums re-evaluate the ties between abstraction and woven textiles. Since most of the artists active in fiber media have been women, neglect of their ambitious work may be attributable to more than institutional oversight; it is also tied to a denigration of “mechanical arts” like weaving. Despite attempts to change that sorry narrative, starting with MoMA’s 1969 “Wall Hangings” exhibition, progress has been sporadic, but momentum has been seriously building with shows like ICA Boston’s “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present” (2014) and “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” (2023) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as well as solo presentations of Anni Albers (2018), Magdalena Abakanowicz (2022), and Sheila Hicks (2018).
Amaral’s works can lie flat against the wall like tapestries or hang freely from the ceiling, meant to be seen from all sides. Both types impress with their invention and achieve remarkable sculptural effects. Thickness, depth, form, and material are all explored consistently, using techniques both ancient and modern, as the constructive processes of weaving, braiding, and knotting come together with often monumental scale to create a sense of commanding presence.
At the Fondation Cartier, the double-height, ground-floor gallery was used to great effect, with large-scale hangings in the round activating the architecture of the space. Two panels of the multipartite Gran Muro (1976) were installed so that their composition of woven strips overlapped like tiles on a building. The wool and coarse horsehair offer a tempting tactile appeal, while colors ranging from dark reds and warm yellows to pale blues and chalky grays convey strong impressions of weathering and passing time. The presence of horsehair, historically used to reinforce lime plaster and adobe, underscores the association with manmade constructions. Amaral similarly exploits its stiffness to achieve large areas. Across the same gallery, the terracotta-toned surface of the equally massive Muro en rojos (1982) rippled like autumn leaves against the backdrop of Jean Nouvel’s open weave steel structure.
The luminous, and surprising, staging of these works was conceived in consultation with the artist by architect Lina Ghotmeh (who also designed the Miami exhibition). Every aspect of the space was taken into consideration, even the floor, which was strewn with chunks of gray slate to suggest a landscape. For works that insist on notions of origin and place—specifically, the Andean environment of Amaral’s native Colombia—this was a sympathetic and resonant atmosphere, and one that allowed viewers imaginative entry into the artist’s thinking. Nature and culture, past and present, are potent inspirations for Amaral, from present-day Bogotá to ancient forms, including the Inca quipu, a record-keeping device of colored and knotted cotton cords that dates to the first millennium CE. For European audiences, Ama- ral’s use of Indigenous techniques and local expertise strikes a chord with the work of Jagoda Buić (also featured in “Wall Hangings”), whose processes and complex geometric patterns were informed by her native Croatian coast and by folk art handed down through generations.
Modernism and its aesthetic theories also enter this historical mix. The geometric structure and layered colors in Escrito 19 (2017), for instance, carry on the Bauhaus weaving tradition of Gunta Stölzl, the school’s head of textiles, who characterized tapestries as “painting[s] made of wool.” The Bauhaus emphasis on improvisation and experiment, which Amaral encountered as a student at Cranbrook, underlies not only her unconventional approach to process, but also her development from planar surfaces to volumetric structures.
A different atmosphere prevailed in the basement gallery, where dark walls and dramatic lighting accentuated bold colors and reflective surfaces of gold and silver leaf. Visitors moved through a spiral of wall-hung and free-hanging objects—including Strata VX (2009), which undulates with light, and Cesta Lunar 50B (1991/2017), in which gold- and platinum-leafed linen tesserae scintillate with constantly modifying shades—following the phases and themes of Amaral’s production. The journey culminated in an elliptical, equally dark chamber where 13 golden panels from the “Estelas” series (2007–present) hovered between floor and ceiling. For Amaral, “the color gold has a kind of magic to it, and it’s not about what it means, it’s about what it reflects and illuminates.” Still, it is hard not to locate her gilded panels within the wider culture of pre-Columbian artifacts and richly carved colonial Spanish retables—an association with spirituality and ritual reinforced by the installation. Though theatrical, and strangely reminiscent of an H. Rider Haggard adventure, the effect was spectacular, evoking the sensation of entering an “inner sanctum,” a space for arcana.
Spatiality as a feature of Amaral’s practice was best seen back in the airy, glazed ground-floor gallery, where 23 triangular hanging forms from the “Brumas” series (2013–18) were gathered. These soft, prismatic, and diaphanous cloud formations, conceptually spirited out of the Andean mountainscape, found an echo in the angular architecture of central Paris visible through the glass walls. No rocks were placed here, since the eye moved strictly upward. The perception of these grid-shaped amalgamations of dyed linen strips likewise shifted, linking inferences based in landscape and objective abstractions of shape, line, color, and space.
It is no accident that fiber art has fully entered the canon of Modernism at this moment; the range of three-dimensional practice has never been more fluid or wider in scope. Amaral and her peers, side-lined for decades, have always blurred boundaries, and not only between craft and so-called “high” art. Finally, they are being recognized as pioneers in shaping a broader vocabulary of sculptural language.
