ICA Miami, in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, presents a major retrospective of the work of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, bringing together more than 50 works from six decades, and featuring recent and historical examples, some of which have never been presented outside of her home country. The presentation at ICA Miami follows a tremendous success in Paris at the Fondation Cartier.
It reveals the breadth and complexity of Amaral’s practice, highlighting crucial periods in the development of her career as she moved from colorful explorations of the grid to experiments with materiality and scale.
Amaral’s sculptures and installations push the boundaries of fiber art, often combining weaving, knotting, and braiding to create striking abstract three-dimensional forms. Her earliest explorations, from the 1960s, frequently take inspiration from nature and feature unconventional weaving techniques. During the 1970s, Amaral created a group of monumental wall works; superimposing constructed layers of wool and horsehair enabled her to work at scale, evoking brick walls, leaves, and geological layers. Her investigations would also lead her to experiment with paint, linen, cotton, gesso, gold leaf, and palladium.
Complicating narratives of modernism and craft, Amaral’s unique sculptural language draws from Bauhaus Modernism and Constructivism along with pre-Columbian art and Indigenous weaving traditions. The exhibition includes the artist’s “Estelas” (1996–2018), vibrant goldleaf works that refract and absorb light, which recall pre-Columbian gold work reminiscent of funerary sculptures of pre-Hispanic archaeological sites. Works from Amaral’s most recent series, the cloudlike “Brumas” (2013–2018), are suspended from the ceiling. “Brumas” imbues geometric modernisms with the rich history and variety of landscape.
Olga de Amaral (b. 1932 in Bogotá) studied architecture at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Colombia and textile design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Recent solo exhibitions on the artist have been held at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2024-2025); Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH (2024); the Cranbrook Art Museum, Michigan (2021-2022); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2021); and Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá (2017). Amaral’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally, most recently in “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” La Biennale di Venezia, 60th International Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy; “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women,” The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., USA, (all 2024); “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” LACMA, Los Angeles (2023), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2024), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2024), MoMA, New York (2025), among many others. Her work is held in major public and private collections worldwide, including Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
The exhibition design in Paris and Miami has been created by award winning architect Lina Ghotmeh, founder of Paris based international practice, Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture. Ghotmeh has envisioned a vertical forest where the works appear to grow organically within the gallery, a direct reference to Amaral’s sources of inspiration. Ghotmeh recently won the competition to lead the redesign of the British Museum’s Western Range galleries.
Olga de Amaral was originated by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris with curator Marie Perennès and is co-presenting the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami with Stephanie Seidel, Monica and Blake Grossman Curator, ICA Miami.
