Olga de Amaral’s Textural Legacy Comes to Life at ICA Miami in Major U.S. Retrospective

Source: Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

Reported By: Caroline Dalal

April 18th, 2025 – This spring, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) invites audiences into a world woven from gold, geometry, and history with the opening of a major retrospective dedicated to Colombian artist Olga de Amaral. Opening May 1, 2025, the exhibition—organized in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain—offers a rare opportunity to experience more than 50 works spanning six decades of Amaral’s career. Some of these pieces have never been seen outside of Colombia.

Fresh from a critically lauded run at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the exhibition makes its U.S. debut in Miami, a city whose cultural rhythms resonate with Amaral’s layered, hybrid approach to material and meaning. Known for redefining the language of textile art, Amaral’s works transcend medium and classification—evoking architecture, archeology, and abstraction in equal measure.

Born in Bogotá in 1932, Amaral’s early background in architecture and textile design laid the foundation for a career spent pushing against the boundaries of fiber art. Her works—ranging from intimate woven panels to monumental sculptural installations—demonstrate a lifelong investigation into materiality, transformation, and light.

This retrospective presents Amaral’s key bodies of work, from her vibrant 1960s grids and wool-based wall pieces of the 1970s, to her shimmering Estelas series (1996–2018) that use gold leaf to invoke the ritualistic aura of pre-Columbian artifacts. Her suspended Brumas (2013–2018) soften geometry with a poetic drift, suggesting clouds or veils of memory. Altogether, the exhibition shows Amaral’s deep fluency in merging the spiritual and the formal, the intuitive and the engineered.

Miami holds a particular place in Amaral’s story. Coraza en morados (1977), one of the artist’s largest textile-based works, was originally commissioned for Miami International Airport and is included in this exhibition. Another monumental piece, El Gran muro (1976), first created for Atlanta’s Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, illustrates Amaral’s ambition to merge textiles and architecture—an ambition that feels especially potent within the urban textures of Miami’s Design District, where ICA Miami is located.

The exhibition design, led by award-winning architect Lina Ghotmeh, responds directly to Amaral’s work and Miami’s natural environment. Situated on ICA Miami’s third floor, which overlooks a canopy of trees, the gallery has been transformed into a kind of vertical forest—where the artist’s pieces seem to grow organically in space. Ghotmeh employs the spiral, a recurring motif in Amaral’s practice, as an organizing principle, guiding visitors through a gradual unfolding of form and philosophy.

This sensitivity to context and movement reinforces the physicality of Amaral’s work. Her use of materials—linen, cotton, wool, gesso, gold leaf, and palladium—resists the decorative label so often applied to textiles. Instead, each element acts as a gesture toward transformation, contemplation, and space-making.

Curated by Marie Perennès (formerly of Fondation Cartier) and Stephanie Seidel, ICA Miami’s Monica and Blake Grossman Curator, the show positions Amaral as a vital figure in Postwar Latin American abstraction—one whose influence spans the craft and conceptual movements alike.

That ethos pulses throughout the exhibition, reminding viewers that fiber, often considered soft or marginal, can carry enormous weight—historically, symbolically, architecturally.

The retrospective is supported by ICA Miami’s commitment to sustainability, with climate-conscious shipping and carbon offsetting practices, and continues the museum’s mission to present pioneering international artists across generations.

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