The progression from modern art to contemporary art marked an evident distancing between artistic production and the world of crafts. This distancing may be related to the transformation of the concept of beauty and the leading role it had been playing in the history of art, where it could be said that it went from being the primary purpose to become the consequence of processes related to the concept and that made it cease to be fundamental.
Characteristics such as the time of production or the simple evidence of the artist's hand went into the background and even came to be related to craftsmanship, which has not been commonly recognized as art. Some examples of the most representative movements of this transformation are conceptual art, minimalism and pop art.
Nowadays there is a generalized interest in returning to the primordial, slowing down the speed of contemporary life, and revisiting the traditions of our ancestors and their special connection with nature. Bearing in mind that art is the primary manifestation of its context, themes such as deforestation, the recovery of identity or mass production vs. manual production, are at the forefront of the topics dealt with by artists, who are once again approaching the trades to strengthen their reasoning.
In Latin America and specifically in Colombia, we have an important textile tradition that has passed from generation to generation and has been one of the most important legacies of our pre-Columbian cultures. Weaving, apart from having a poetic relationship with the utopian structure of society, is related to the territory and therefore to nature.
Olga de Amaral structures her work through exceptional approaches to weaving. In this sense, she is a chronicler of multiple times and peoples. Her tapestries, assembled with complex weavings, show an enormous technical mastery, which for 6 decades, have been the texts to be deciphered of a civilization, a culture and a tradition.
Amaral's works have been read and interpreted in different scenarios around the world, projecting what today we could identify as an aesthetic textile posture, which the art scene has been able to recognize with the presence of his work in more than 40 museums around the world. After 87 years of weaves and warps, his work gathers meticulous technical qualities that have unveiled an aesthetic underworld loaded with enormous spiritual meanings, which add to the multiple reasons why his pieces have been essential in the Latin American artistic production of the 20th century.
Amaral's work exalts the immense heritage left to us by our ancestors and through his legacy, he speaks about what we are and what we should really treasure.
By: Daniela Marin Aristizabal