Alquimia Plata 6(B), 1995

Gesso, acrylic, silver leaf, and gold leaf on linen
© TK TK

Emerging during the height of the fiber art movement in the mid-1960s, Olga de Amaral developed a facility for off-loom constructions and became a key figure in the development of Latin American abstraction. In the early 1980s, Amaral began her Alquimia (Alchemy) series, to which Alquimia Plata 6(B)—a wall hanging constructed of more than one thousand individual rectangular tiles, woven from linen and arranged into vertical columns—belongs. To make the work, the artist secured each tile in place before applying gesso to smooth the surfaces, then topped that with acrylic paint and gold and silver leaf. The geometric configuration suggests an allusion to the tiled roofs of her hometown of Bogotá. While the value and sacred nature of gold in a number of pre-Columbian cultures is also a reference point, the artist attributes her adoption of the material to the British ceramist Lucie Rie (1902–1995), in whose studio she saw a broken vase being mended with gold according to the Japanese art of kintsugi, which treats repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Amaral has insisted that she always remained centered on the formal challenge of “how I could turn textile into golden surfaces of light.”