Jim Amaral (b. 1933, California), the Colombia-based artist whose fantastical drawings explore the subconscious, the body, and desire, will be the focus of LAMB’s Frieze Masters debut, with a Spotlight presentation from 14–18 October 2026. Centred on works from Invisible Flowers (1979–80), the presentation will be accompanied by Jim Amaral: A Study of Five Decades, an exhibition of works on paper from the 1960s to the 2010s opening at LAMB’s Mayfair gallery on 9 October.
Based in Bogotá since 1957, Amaral has developed a practice encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblage. His work draws on California’s mid-century experimental culture, surrealism, pre-Columbian and classical art, and psychoanalytic approaches to human experience. Extended stays in Paris during the 1970s provided an important setting for the development of his drawings, in which anatomical fragments become unfamiliar objects and imaginary organisms.
Integral to Amaral’s practice is his love story with his wife, the artist Olga de Amaral, spanning more than seven decades. Their relationship began while both were studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1954–55. Their friendship grew as Jim helped her at the loom. It was while dancing the tango one evening together that they began exchanging glances.
When Olga returned to Colombia and Jim left for naval service in the Philippines, they sustained their relationship through two years of love letters exchanged across continents. Their personal correspondence from the 1950s became a space in which to dream of a shared future. Through words, doodles, and photographs, they shared their experiences and began sketching out the life they hoped to build together. These letters hold the beginnings of a life first imagined at a distance, which they would go on to make real.
In 1957, Jim travelled to Bogotá to visit Olga; they married that December, beginning their shared life in Colombia. The creative energy that resonated between them during their early correspondence continued through decades of work and family life. Their relationship provided an enduring foundation for two distinct artistic lives.
Together, they also developed Telas Amaral, a textile studio in Bogotá, building a business alongside their family and their individual practices. Jim’s early work in furniture and interior design formed part of this shared creative environment, alongside Olga’s experimentation with weaving.
For Amaral, the senses are fundamental to consciousness and to our understanding of the world. Hands grow ears, lips emerge from palms, and flowers bloom with human body parts. These transformations explore how touch, sight, and hearing connect us to our surroundings and to one another. His work questions the separation of body and spirit associated with Judeo-Christian thought, placing physical experience at the centre of an enquiry into identity, desire, and existence.
Drawing has also been central to Amaral’s self-examination. His engagement with Jungian psychoanalysis encouraged an attention to dreams and to images emerging from the subconscious. On paper, these images develop through precise, deliberate mark-making. The freedom of their associations sits alongside a sustained concern with technique, as Amaral searches for a visual language capable of expressing the contents of his inner life.
In Invisible Flowers, ink and watercolour drawings depict hybrid plants whose reproductive structures merge with human anatomy. Their fine lines and carefully described forms recall eighteenth-century botanical illustrations, giving imaginary specimens the appearance of closely observed natural phenomena. By treating human reproductive organs with the attention given to the reproductive structures of plants, Amaral invites a reconsideration of the body as part of the natural world.
The series’ title alludes to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, whom Amaral befriended in Paris. Calvino’s descriptions of invented cities offer a literary counterpart to the artist’s imagined botany. In Amaral’s drawings, the familiar structures of stems, petals, and leaves are reconfigured through combinations of bodily and vegetal forms, extending his exploration of eroticism, perception, and the imagination.
Amaral’s Love Letter drawings of the 1970s form a distinct body of work inspired by his personal correspondence with Olga in the 1950s. In these drawings, bodily forms become a language of their own. Fingers, lips, and other anatomical fragments appear in sequences that resemble handwriting, conveying intimacy through the arrangement and rhythm of marks across the page. In works such as Letter Folded, Sealed (1975), he painted over handwritten letters found at a flea market.
At LAMB’s Mayfair gallery, Jim Amaral: A Study of Five Decades places these interests within a broader selection of works on paper from the 1960s to the 2010s. Love-letter drawings, dedication works, and surreal watercolours trace his continuing exploration of the body, the subconscious, and human connection.
Amaral’s engagement with Jungian psychoanalysis in the 1960s became the catalyst for a remarkable series of black-and-white drawings. Works such as Born Once, Once Death and Untitled (both 1965) reveal the mastery of line that would come to define his practice.
An untitled lithograph from 1985 relates to Mourning Fruits, a series of paintings created during the 1980s, the only decade in which Amaral painted. Drawing on the traditions of vanitas and classical still life, the series explores the body’s mortality and transformation, reflecting on the passage of time and the certainty of death.
In the Incubus and Succubus series of the 1990s, his distinctive zoomorphic figures, part-human and part-invention, enter a more mythological register. The series draws on demons associated with dreams in medieval mythology: incubi, from the Latin incubus, “one who lies down”, are male demons who pursue women in dreams. Their counterparts, succubi, from the Latin succubus, “those who lie under”, are demons who take the appearance of a woman and harass men.
In watercolours such as Per-se № 001 (2003) and Per-se № 014 (2001), Amaral comes full circle, returning to the sensual figural groups of his psychoanalytic drawings of the 1960s, now rendered in vivid colour. Alongside his kaleidoscopic compositions, these works reveal a vitality and freedom that grow with age, a testament to the scope of his imagination.
Text by Leighanne Murray
