Albert Kriemler has spent years collaborating with artists — painters, sculptors, photographers — but until now never with someone who shares his fundamental obsession with fabric and textile. Olga de Amaral changed that.

De Amaral is a 93-year-old artist based in Bogotá whose work has been finding new audiences. A 2024 exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris brought her significant attention, and last year one of her pieces sold at Christie’s for $3.1 million — more than five times its high estimate. Kriemler has followed her work for a decade, drawn in partly through an unexpected parallel: Akris’s signature horsehair bags use the same fibre de Amaral frequently works with. The personal connection ran deeper too. “She has a studio where she works with seven ladies,” Kriemler noted, “and she told me, ‘without my 14 hands, I couldn’t do my art.’ And, of course, I couldn’t do what I do without my tailors, my people.”

The collaboration announced itself immediately. The cocoon coat that opened the show, its surface gold-leafed, read as a direct homage to de Amaral’s Estelas series — the work that anchored the Cartier Fondation exhibition. Underneath was a dress of layered organza tiles that took its cues from the shimmering gridded surfaces of her Alquimia tapestries. Her Nudo sculptures — cascading silk fringes suspended from a knot, suggesting waterfalls or a horse’s tail — became a recurring motif, appearing on the front and back of a chunky ribbed poncho, trimming the waistline of a velvet neoprene pencil skirt and accenting an evening clutch, all in black.

Against the black and gold, de Amaral’s love of colour provided a vivid counterpoint — Caladium red, magenta, turquoise and Amazon green, all pulled directly from her work. “She said, ‘I love colors, I live colors,'” Kriemler noted. The texture remained paramount throughout even in the brighter pieces: the subtle sheen of a green viscose stretch corduroy pantsuit, the glossy eel leather of a turquoise jacket and skirt.

What distinguished this collaboration from some of Kriemler’s previous artistic partnerships was how fully the references were absorbed rather than applied. Because both artists speak the same language — that of fibre, surface and material — the de Amaral elements and the Akris design sensibility felt genuinely inseparable. “We speak in sync,” Kriemler said. The collection bore that out.