Born in 1932 in Bogotá, Olga de Amaral is an emblematic figure of the Colombian art scene. Following a degree in architecture at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca (1951-1952), she continued her studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (1954-1955), which has been compared to Germany’s Bauhaus school. While there, she discovered textile art in the weaving workshop of Marianne Strengell, a Finnish-American artist and designer who was one of the first to favor the structure and grid of textiles over the pattern.

In the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz, Amaral contributed to the development of Fiber Art, using new materials and techniques drawing equally from Modernist principles and the folk traditions of her native country. Her large-scale abstract works free themselves from the wall and refuse any form of categorization.

At once paintings, sculptures, installations, and architecture, they envelop viewers in the artist’s sensorial, personal universe. Appointed ‘Visionary Artist’ by New York’s Museum of Art and Design in 2005, Amaral more recently received the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Her work can be found in major public and private collections worldwide, including those of the Tate Modern, the MoMA, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, dedicated
a major exhibition to her entitled To Weave a Rock.

Curator: Marie Perennès
Exhibition coordinator: Aby Gaye

Architecture of the exhibition designed by Lina Ghotmeh

To design the exhibition space, the French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh immersed herself in Amaral’s sources of inspiration: on the ground floor of Jean Nouvel’s building, surrounded by the garden by Lothar Baumgarten, she has created a landscape of slate stones connecting the interior, exterior, and the works, as though they were set in a stony, rugged landscape. On the below-ground level, the architectreuses the spiral motif found in some of Amaral’s works, to guide visitors through an enveloping space in which the artist’s explorations gradually emerge. Playing with contrast, scale and the position of the works, grazing the ground or hanging from the ceiling, Ghotmeh tells the story of the artist’s work through her own weaving of the Fondation Cartier’s space. She adopts an approach that she refers to as «archeology of the future» and draws her inspiration from the memory of the site and the works to immerse visitors into a timeless moment, rich in emotions and sensations.