Jim Amaral

Biography

Jim Amaral’s first solo exhibition opened in 1962 at the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco. It consisted of small ink drawings with erotic subjects, treated with humour.

He was born on 3 March 1933 in Pleasanton, California. His father was Portuguese, his mother an American of Italian descent. His childhood was spent in a rural setting, which he later called “an interior exile”. As a young man he wrote poetry. He studied for two years, in 1952–53, at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he took courses in the history of art and architecture, graduated from Stanford with a bachelor’s degree in 1954 and decided to work in the arts. In 1954–55 he studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. There he met the Colombian artist Olga de Amaral; they were married in Colombia in December 1957.

From 1955 to 1957 he served in the US Navy in the Philippines. In 1958 he moved to Bogotá and at first worked for a company that made furniture and interiors. He then decided to become a full-time artist: he began casting bronze and making collages and abstract drawings. His first solo show in Colombia, of drawings, collages and oil paintings, was held in 1964 at the Galería El Callejón. In 1966–67 the family moved briefly to New York, and after returning he went to the United States to teach drawing at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and at the same time began teaching drawing at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá.

In 1970–72 the family travelled around Europe and settled for a long period in Paris. In the autumn of 1971 his first European exhibition took place at the Albert Loeb gallery, and it brought him critical acclaim. He returned to Paris for long stays in 1974–75 and again in 1979–80. In the 1970s he exhibited in France, Italy, Sweden, Germany and Belgium; Jacques Leenhardt and José Pierre wrote about him. The drawings of those years are erotic and realistic in manner: fragments of bodies, sexual organs, flowers with petals shaped like lips and ears, biomorphic beings. For them he developed a technique combining pencil and watercolour on paper primed with gesso. “Invisible Flowers” belongs to this period; its title alludes to “Invisible Cities” by his friend Italo Calvino. There were also collages and assemblages using antique boxes, old photographs, books and colonial furniture. To reproaches that his work was erotic he replied that he did not see it himself, and he was surprised at how annoyed people become at the sight of a penis.

In 1980 he returned to Bogotá. For the next two decades he worked in oil and acrylic, painting meditative compositions in a dark, earthy range of colours. Among them is the series “Mourning Fruit”: dried, mummified fruit on patterned surfaces, with celestial bodies hanging in the sky. The layers of acrylic in his paintings are dense, and, in his words, the more completely the space is filled, the wider the possibility of the void grows. The fruit, he said, is a contradiction: it means life, yet it is itself dry and lonely. In 1983 the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá held a retrospective, “Metamorphosis”, and at the 17th São Paulo Biennale he showed a work titled “Life Is a Transitory Transformation”.

He had tried sculpture as early as 1959, but the result disappointed him and he turned to collage and drawing. In 1989, on a trip with his wife to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he came across the Shidoni Foundry and returned to bronze. His lost-wax sculptures are built on mythological subjects, metamorphosis, death and the mysteries of the cosmos. The figures often have small heads, no facial features and an ambiguous gender. The sensuality of his earlier drawings passed into the texture and refined patinas. Eduardo Serrano saw in these creatures a “composed anxiety” about the future, and William Ospina found irony in them. Three bronzes, “Women with Wheels” (1994), have stood since 1996 at the entrance to the Colombian stock exchange on Carrera Séptima in Bogotá; large bronzes are also in the garden of the National Museum.

In 2003 the Chilean photographer Roberto Edwards invited him to take part in the project “Cuerpos pintados” (“Painted Bodies”). Amaral painted the bodies of people of short stature from Santiago, turning them into angels, demons and cupids, and in a later series made them into living versions of his sculptures. The retrospective “Trans/figuraciones 1960–2004”, curated by José Roca, was held at the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogotá in 2004. In 2013–14 he was chosen to produce the graphic imagery for the 8th Cartagena International Music Festival.

Later he worked more in watercolour and ink drawing, artist’s books and single-edition bronzes. In these, figures of people and animals gave way to desolate geometrical landscapes, ashen carts and timeless machines that look both futuristic and archaic. In 2016 the Galerie Agnes Mosplaisir in Paris held the exhibition “Chariots of Humankind”. He lives in Bogotá and works at Casa Amaral.