40 - HELENA CEBALLOS

HELENA CEBALLOS Colombia, 1931–2022 Set of Rhombuses - Ref. V Mexico, 1976 Hemp warp and wool weft 115 x 60 cm Fabric label with technical specifications “Helena Ceballos Ref: V Mx de /76” on the back. The work of textile artist Helena Ceballos is one of the best-kept secrets of Colombian art from the second half of the 20th century. While the works of her sister Olga Ceballos de Amaral have achieved international acclaim and commanded exceptional prices, Helena’s works—far scarcer and presumably scattered among the various countries where she lived—remain yet to be discovered and properly appreciated. Born in Medellín, Helena Ceballos forged a career in the field of textile art, quietly and patiently building a body of work with a distinct geometric style in which rationality and spirituality, tradition and modernity converge. Her life story was marked by frequent moves. After first directing the Amaral Workshop in Bogotá from 1957 to 1962, she moved to Peru and, later, to Paris, where she studied the “alto liso” tapestry technique—used in the creation of traditional Gobelins tapestries—and produced her first experimental tapestries. Between 1966 and 1967, she returned to Bogotá to once again take over the direction of the Taller Amaral. At the end of this period, she returned to Paris and then moved to Caracas, where she served as a professor of high-warp weaving at the Taller Fundación Newman. Between 1969 and 1974, she resumed her role as director of the Amaral Workshop in Bogotá, balancing her professional work with teaching at the Universidad de los Andes, where she taught textile courses. In 1971, she participated in the Proarte exhibition, a Colombian association affiliated with the World Crafts Council, where she received an honorable mention. Between 1976 and 1979, she lived in Mexico, where she continued her textile research. There, in 1976, she created *Juego de rombos*, the work included in this auction. With its rigorous geometric structure, the piece reveals a subtle dialectical interplay between textures and colors, the result of a slow and meticulous production process that demands concentration and patience—qualities inherent to the art of weaving. After her time in Mexico, Ceballos settled in Quito, Ecuador, where she opened her own workshop, working there with no assistants other than herself. In 1980, she participated with two tapestries in a retrospective on weaving in Colombia, held at the CIDAP in Cuenca, Ecuador. The following year, the Tempora Gallery in Bogotá dedicated a tribute exhibition to her, featuring fifteen woven pieces created between 1965 and 1981, including *Juego de rombos*. The exhibition brochure included an introductory text by the writer Álvaro Mutis, with whom the artist shared a deep friendship. In it, Mutis highlights the rigor and patience that characterize her work and anticipates the international recognition that, in his view, her work deserved: “The first thing we notice in Helena Ceballos’s tapestries,” writes Mutis, “is the unyielding rigor with which they have been conceived and executed [...] The structure of each of Helena Ceballos’s tapestries has been conceived from the very beginning without resorting to those solutions that present themselves to the artist as the work takes shape—solutions that seem, at first glance, so fitting and full of rich possibilities, but which always conceal the seeds of their own dissolution. More than the tapestry’s Eastern roots, what attracts, intrigues, and moves me about her work is a certain quality of medieval craftsmanship that ennobles it. Fortunately, the foolish “technical progress” that is killing us has invaded this field almost not at all. I don’t think the loom on which Helena weaves her tapestries differs much from the one Eleanor of Aquitaine used to weave hers [...] But let’s not delude ourselves—we’ll soon have “kinetic tapestry” and a few other such trifles in vogue. For now, enjoying such a pure art form—an achievement as complete and rich as these tapestries by a Colombian artist who will very soon attain the international recognition her work deserves—is an opportunity as valuable as it is rare, Here is a weaver of dreams—dreams less fleeting than our own lives and illuminated by the unchanging light of a sublime beauty that rescues us from the stammering folly that overwhelms us in these republics and in these times.” Exhibitions: 1981. Helana Ceballos. Galería Tempora, Bogotá. Private collection, Bogotá.