Olga de Amaral - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Exploring the interplays of texture and color, Olga de Amaral’s Untitled, circa 1970s, is an exceptional example of the artist’s signature weaving practice. Born in Bogotá in 1932, de Amaral is deeply influenced by her Colombian culture and identity, using unconventional materials such as wool and horsehair to illustrate depth and space in a non-figurative way. Educated at Cranbrook Academy of the Arts in Michigan, de Amaral studied applied art and textiles, blurring the lines between art and craft with her groundbreaking practice. Representing Colombia in the Venice Biennale in 1986, de Amaral will return to Venice, participating in the 2024 Biennale.


    Staging a solo exhibition of her Woven Walls, the series to which Untitled belongs, at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York in 1970, de Amaral received recognition early on in her career and continues to do so today. In 2019, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art in New York, making her contributions to the art of textiles as evident today as it was in the 1970s. Today, her works are in the prominent public collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Examples of her Woven Walls can be found at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

    “As I build these surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation and reflection... Tapestry, fibers, strands, units, cords, are all transparent layers with their own meanings, revealing and hiding each other to make one presence, one tone that speaks about the texture of time.”
    —Olga de Amaral

    Woven Walls

     

    One of her Muros Tejidos, or Woven Walls, the present work wraps braided spools of purple thread into a three-dimensional tapestry. Using rods to support the vertical weaves, the work becomes sculptural, challenging the notion of traditional weaving. Against the wall, Untitled becomes almost architectural, giving the work a sense of depth and structure. Carefully manipulating each thread within the composition, de Amaral creates complex, heavily textured plaits and patterns, allowing the hand of the artist to shine through the tapestry. While creating the Woven Walls, the artist noted, “as I build these surfaces, I create spaces of mediation, 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

     

    i Olga de Amaral, The House of My Imagination: Lecture by Olga de Amaral at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 24, 2003, Bogotá, 2003, pp. 6–8.

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist in the 1970s)
      Thence by descent to the present owner

    • Artist Biography

      Olga de Amaral

      Colombian • 1932

      At age 22 with a degree in architectural design, Olga de Amaral moved from Bogotá to the United States where she studied fiber art at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She returned to Colombia in 1955, and in 1956 she and her husband, Jim Amaral, opened a workshop of hand-woven textiles. De Amaral's distinctive large-scale abstract woven pieces are often covered in gold and silver leaf, lending them a shimmering, almost sculptural quality in contrast to the feeling of a tapestry. Her richly textured pieces evoke the varied natural landscapes of Colombia as well as ancient pre-Columbian gold artifacts. The artist's architectural background is evident in the precise sculptural quality of her works, but de Amaral says her craft is driven by emotion and that she does not plan for particular patterns to emerge. 

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157

Untitled

wool and horsehair
90 x 64 x 5 in. (228.6 x 162.6 x 12.7 cm)
Executed in the 1970s, this work is registered in the artist's archives under reference number OA0109*.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
NY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024