Lisson Los Angeles is honored to present a focused survey of works by renowned Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, marking her first solo exhibition in the city in almost a decade. Spanning from the early 1970s through 2018, the exhibition traces key developments in Amaral’s influential, six-decade career and her singular practice that dissolves the boundaries between weaving, painting, and sculpture. Through landmark works of varying scale and format, the show offers a rare opportunity to engage deeply with Amaral’s unique visual and material language, interlacing linen, wool, horsehair, Japanese paper, acrylic, and precious metals into luminous, sculptural forms that shimmer with historical, spiritual, and environmental resonance.

The works on view bear witness to the determined plurality of Amaral’s art since the 1970s. Materials including horsehair, Japanese paper, and gold and palladium leaf combine to produce a fluid, emotional and aesthetic register, one that fluctuates between the epic and the intimate, the material and the spiritual. In two distinct works, created nearly forty years apart, Amaral has suspended a woven structure from the ceiling. Eslabón familiar (1973) consists of a rope-like length of horsehair that loops with Baroque intricacy around a larger loop-shaped armature. By contrast with the internal dynamism of this early work, Nudo 19 (turquesa) (2014) takes the form of a slender column of turquoise-dyed linen threads, stiffened with gesso and tied in a single knot towards the top. The object appears both airborne and earthbound, magnifying a simple gesture at the core of all weaving to a grand scale.