Post War and Contemporary Art

Provenance:

Bellas Artes Gallery, Santa Fe

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature:

Edward Lucie-Smith, Olga de Amaral: el manto de la memoria, Bogotá, Zona Ediciones, 2000, pp. 74-76, 214, illus.

Lot Essay:

Olga de Amaral's Moon Baskets 

Olga de Amaral (née Olga Ceballos Velez, Colombian, b. 1932) works primarily with hand-spun wool, cotton, and linen, supplementing the fibers with the addition of vibrant colors and precious metals as she explores dimensional space. Rooted in geometric compositions, de Amaral combines the practices of indigenous cultures with the gestural intuition of Abstract Expressionism, conjuring a spell to transform traditional tapestry weaving into something part domestic craft and part otherworldly. We are honored to offer Cesta Lunar 35 (1990), a sweeping, shimmering work comprised of paint and gold leaf enmeshed in fibers, bright gold threads cascading down to a rich violet umber -- an excellent example of the cosmic voyages taken in her Cesta Lunares (Moon Baskets) series.  

Growing up in a in a large, religious family in suburban Bogotá, de Amaral first obtained a degree in architecture before moving to the United States to study fiber art at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. As she described:  

In Cranbrook, the textile workshop had eight looms placed against the windows: one of them, in the corner, would be my home for a year. There, I lived my most intimate moments of solitude; there was born my certainty about color; its strength; I felt as if I loved color as though it were something tangible. I also learned to speak in color. I remember with nostalgia that experience in which souls touched hands.  

(Quoted in Olga de Amaral: The Mantle of Memory, Galerie Agnès Monplaisir, 2013)  

After her schooling, de Amaral returned to Colombia and began to make decorative textiles on commission. When her college sweetheart, Jim Amaral, returned from duty in the Philippines, they married and had two children, while de Amaral continued to develop her craft. After founding and teaching at the textile department at the University of Los Andes in Colombia, de Amaral and her family relocated to New York and then traveled widely throughout South America, Europe, and Japan.  

De Amaral was deeply moved by her travels, particularly her experiences with the Yanomami, a tribe native to the Amazon rainforests between Venezuela and Brazil with a rich culture steeped in mythology.    

I consider my Moon Baskets (Cestas Lunares) to be a clear example of thoughts woven into a surface. They express feelings that arose when I saw the baskets made by the Yanomami (or Yanomamo), a tribe in Venezuela known also as the Children of the Moon. I was fascinated by the compact straw basketweave, the elemental enclosing shapes, the achiote-red patina, and, especially by the large, scattered circular motifs with which they decorated their baskets and their bodies. This simple act of adornment revealed to me the unity they perceived between themselves, their objects, and their activities; the unity between their minds and the moon they revere. The plaiting I used to build the Moon Baskets was meant to recall the elementary construction of their objects.  

(Quoted in Olga de Amaral: The House of My Imagination, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003)  

A more personal cultural reverence can be found in de Amaral’s use of gold leaf in her textiles, playing with light and reflection in ways that pay homage to the churches of her childhood: “Besides the spiritual ingredient of going to mass, I was fascinated by the ornate interiors of churches, where candlelight refracts from gilded altars and inlaid mirrors,” recalled Amaral in an interview. (Quoted in Jim and Olga de Amaral: Lives Reflected in Art, The City Paper Bogotá, June 2017)  

De Amaral’s works are full of contradictions. Championing the domesticity and tradition of weaving -- a practice often devalued in high art -- through the opulent luxury of gold leaf, her forms are both structured and malleable, each element its own vignette. With each strand, ideas of fine art and craft come to occupy the same space, a goal shared by her contemporaries Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ruth Asawa, and Shelia Hicks. Using an off-the-loom technique, her constructions are built upon woven structures with gesso, pigments, and precious metals forming an inter-dimensional landscape. Her meditative and architectural process is rewarded in expansive hybrids that read as both paintings and ceremonial shrouds, interweaving the past and the present.