Magda Bolumar (1936), despite having dedicated her entire life to an extraordinarily visionary artistic practice marked by varied, delicate and deep lyricism, Bolumar has always been framed within the context of 1960s’ Informalist artists. However, her work also tells us about an artist who is especially interested in establishing confluences between organic and constructive elements. And that is precisely what distinguishes her from those artists of her time who found their means of expression in gesture, in texture and in physical alteration of the pictorial field.
‘Bolumar has always been an artist on the fringes, one who has taken from every movement, from every artistic venture that which has been useful to her in shaping her own language. At the time of the recovery and reinvention of the textile arts in the early 1960s […], Bolumar was able to connect with the making of tapestries, but her xarpelleres [works on sacking] follow different procedures and are different in concept. Her xarpelleres […] are not woven but constructed works that are unquestionably closer to collage and Arte Povera than weaving.’
Bolumar’s xarpelleres call to mind swarms of stars, the skeleton of an animal, a trilobite or cellular compositions. Her works seek that which is the most elemental in the universe and, like an oracle, they speak to us in a language we are unfamiliar with but which we can perceive, that we can hear but cannot understand.’ (Bernat Puigdollers, Magda Bolumar: una mirada a l’impossible, 2021).