“As I build surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection. Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but is also deeply resonant of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element.”

—Olga de Amaral

In Imagen perdida 27, executed in 1996, Colombian artist Olga de Amaral achieves a masterful synthesis of weaving, painting, and sculpture, extending the expressive possibilities of textile art into the realm of high abstraction and architectural presence. A monumental composition of handwoven linen encrusted with gold leaf, this work belongs to her acclaimed Imagen perdida (“Lost Image”) series, initiated in the early 1990s. Like many of her textile-based installations, Imagen perdida 27 invites the viewer into a sensorial field of light, texture, and meditation—an enigmatic surface that defies easy categorization yet resonates with spiritual depth and material intelligence. Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in the year the work was made, Imagen perdida 27 is now being made publicly available for the first time. 

Amaral, born in Bogotá in 1932, trained in architecture before immersing herself in fiber arts at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, a school shaped by the pedagogical influence of the Bauhaus. There, under the guidance of Finnish American weaver Marianne Strengell, she encountered the concept of textile as structure, rather than mere surface or ornament. Strengell’s emphasis on the grid—on weaving as an elemental architecture—would remain central to Amaral’s practice. She describes her relationship to material and technique as a form of language, referring to the strips of linen and cotton she braids and knots as “words,” assembled into visual “texts” that speak to landscape, memory, and emotion.

 “I find that the knot is the beginning of everything. Everything is accidental to me. An accident becomes a work.”

—Olga de Amaral

Imagen perdida 27 exemplifies this textual sensibility. Built from overlapping linen squares coated in gesso and luminous gold leaf, the surface undulates and shifts in response to light and movement. The upper section is dense and dark, recalling charred earth or a shadowed canopy, gradually yielding to a radiant cascade of gold in the center, and again darkening at the base. The metallic sheen of the work, combined with its somber tonal architecture, creates a rippling, tactile visuality reminiscent of iridescent butterfly wings or geological strata viewed through a microscope. Each fragment appears animated, suspended between visibility and concealment, between the sacred and the earthly.

This surface complexity is not merely formal. Amaral’s incorporation of gold—a decision catalyzed by a 1970 encounter with a Japanese kintsugi-repaired ceramic in Lucie Rie’s London studio—signals her longstanding dialogue with ritual, myth, and repair. In her hands, gold becomes more than decoration: it is an agent of transformation. It speaks to the glories and devastations of colonialism, referencing both the ceremonial goldwork of pre-Columbian cultures and the baroque opulence of colonial cathedrals. It recalls, too, the “manto” or burial shrouds used in indigenous funerary rites—shields between life and death, history and disappearance.

“I live color. I know it’s an unconscious language, and I understand it. Color is like a friend, it accompanies me.”

—Olga de Amaral

As the title suggests, Imagen perdida is a series concerned with absence—images that have been lost, or perhaps never existed. This ambiguity is central to Amaral’s work, which often seems to hover between the material and the metaphysical. Despite its impressive scale, Imagen perdida 27 does not dominate a room so much as it transforms it, invoking what Amaral once described in a 2003 lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “spaces of meditation, contemplation and reflection… Tapestry, fibers, strands, units, cords, all are transparent layers with their own meanings, revealing and hiding each other to make one presence, one tone that speaks about the texture of time.”ⁱ

The piece’s construction is as technically intricate as its conceptual ambitions. The squares of linen, stiffened and carefully arranged, sometimes overlap or fold forward, producing a sculptural relief effect. The lower fringe moves freely, offering a kinetic counterpoint to the structured rigidity above. Amaral revitalizes the traditional rectangular format through her layered, rhythmic weaving—an act both of preservation and reinvention. The irregular shimmer of the gold leaf, rubbed thin in places to expose fabric beneath, suggests erosion, palimpsest, and time’s passage.

“I want to achieve a sense of floating, as though memory were suspended in a mystical space”

—Olga de Amaral

In her essay for Amaral’s 2022 solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery, scholar Susan Aberth likens the artist’s luminous compositions to “roving chapels of meditative and solemn beauty.”ⁱⁱ The phrase aptly captures the devotional quality of Imagen perdida 27, a work that channels the tactile labor of weaving into a vessel for spiritual resonance. Amaral herself underscores the collective nature of this process. Working with as many as seven assistants in her Bogotá studio, many of whom are women, Amaral blurs the line between individual authorship and communal craft. Her tapestries are not only made by hand—they are informed by it, shaped by a dialogue between the artist’s vision and the material’s inherent intelligence. 

Over six decades, Amaral has forged a singular path through postwar abstraction, aligning herself with figures like Magdalena Abakanowicz and Sheila Hicks, who similarly expanded the boundaries of fiber art. Yet Amaral’s work, rooted in the landscapes and histories of Colombia, retains a singular voice. In her Alquimia (“Alchemy”) works and Estelas (translating to “Stars” as well as “Stelae”) series, she continues to explore the metaphysical potential of textile through gold, light, and space. Imagen perdida 27 anticipates this trajectory, a precursor to her more vertical, architectural forms.

What makes Imagen perdida 27 so resonant is its quiet intensity. It is, as Edward Lucie-Smith wrote in his prologue essay to Olga de Amaral: El Manto de la Memoria (2000), the kind of object that “ought in logic to exist”—not because it reflects historical precedent, but because it fills a void.ⁱⁱⁱ It provides a tactile image of time, a landscape of forgetting and remembering, a sanctuary built from thread and gleam. In a world of transient images, Olga de Amaral weaves permanence.

ⁱ Lisson Gallery, “Olga de Amaral,” n.d., online.
ⁱⁱ Susan Aberth, quoted in Lisson Gallery, “Olga de Amaral, London, 23 September – 29 October, 2022), n.d., online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Edward-Lucie Smith, “Prologue,” Amaral Editores, S.A.S, Olga de Amaral: El Manto de la Memoria, Paris, 2013, p15.