Olga de Amaral is a living legend, not only of Colombian art, but of Latin American and international art. The recent opening of a major retrospective of the Bogota-born artist at the Fondation Cartier in Paris is but the latest in a series of tributes by major international institutions to one of the most acclaimed and sought-after women artists in the world.

Amaral has found her own unmistakable voice in contemporary art through a refined reworking, in a ‘modernist’ and politico-conceptual key, of the ancient craft tradition of weaving, characteristic of the original communities of Latin America.

By recovering the ancestral practice of weaving, Amaral's work becomes a declaration of resistance to international artistic fashions, seen as agents of depersonalisation and uprooting. Moreover, the act of weaving is charged with political and social implications. Conceptually, opting for textile art, as Olga de Amaral did, not only defends an ancestral tradition and cultural memory, but also, by the very fact that to weave is to bind and unite, advocates the harmony of the social fabric.

Another characteristic feature of Olga de Amaral's art is its deep roots in the Colombian and Latin American aesthetic universe. The materials and colours she uses, as well as the rigorously abstract forms she composes, systematically refer to her American roots.

Vestigio (814), from 1995, and Espejo (1132), from 2005, are two of his iconic golden textiles, which evoke the centrality of gold and the sun for pre-Hispanic populations.