Renowned artist Olga de Amaral studied architectural design in college in her native Colombia. She then transferred to Michigan’s venerable Cranbrook Academy of Art and studied textile art; de Amaral would become a key figure in post-War, Latin American abstraction. For her, fiber art was no longer merely a two-dimensional object in space—she metaphorically freed the canvas from the frame, revealing a multidimensional structure in space that relies on a high level of craftsmanship to justify its frank beauty and rich layers of meaning. Amaral likens her art to “painting in space.”

Her materials are primarily linen, gesso, paint and metal leaf, and somehow, as art historian Edward Lucie-Smith has written about her, while “there are in fact no equivalents for what she makes in pre-Columbian archaeology, one feels that such objects ought in logic to exist,” as if she has supplied a missing link, social and cultural, between the two worlds of Europe and the Americas.

De Amaral returned to Bogotá from the United States and founded the textile department in the Universidad de los Andes, which she directed for years. Her artworks hang on the walls with the weight and presence of pre-contact stele, masks, and breastplates, equally evocative of medieval tapestries and chain mail. Despite their visual references to the artist’s native culture, they are in fact modern abstractions that focus upon color, tactility, and a process-driven physicality. They are ephemeral and timeless, and therein lies their satisfying tension: De Amaral’s work stands in for the past and the future within the context of the present.

Bellas Artes gallery principals Bob and Charlotte Kornstein met de Amaral in Bogotá in 1971. Some ten years later, the Kornsteins had established their gallery, Bellas Artes in Santa Fe, where they have exhibited works by de Amaral since 1986. This year, in celebration of three decades of a mutually sustaining relationship, the Kornsteins are pleased to present 30 AÑOS con BELLAS ARTES. This exhibition includes recent works from the past five years that reveal evolving considerations of her unique contributions to the history of contemporary art.

De Amaral was honored in 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Multicultural Gala: An Evening of Many Cultures. Text from the event program declares how remarkable her “woven walls” are for their technical finesse and their deeply felt essence of Colombia, her native country... where she studied Architectural Design before traveling to the U.S. to attend the Textile and Design Program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan... Color and structure are de Amaral’s most important formal concerns... reminiscent of the natural and vernacular landscapes of her country. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient early in her career, de Amaral is a member of the Academía Nácional de Bellas Artes of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco’s De Young Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Renwick Gallery of the National Gallery in Washington, DC; as well as in museums in Paris, Zurich, Kyoto, Zurich, and many others including, of course, her hometown of Bogotá in Colombia.