Zilia Sánchez, an artist known for her bulging, shaped canvases, has died at the age of 98. The Museum of Puerto Rico Art announced the death of the San Juan-based artist on Thursday but did not specify a cause.
Sánchez’s erotic paintings frequently reference the female body, which she abstracts beyond recognition. Using a muted palette of grays and blues, she creates spare canvases taut on wooden frames. These skeletons, in turn, give her paintings a three-dimensional effect.
This form is very unusual. When she began creating these works in the 1960s, minimalism was prevalent and a steely quality prevailed. In contrast, Sanchez’s work asserts the presence of the body, something that minimalists often deny.
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She also demonstrates that the form is flexible rather than formulaic. She often used it to refer to figures from Greek mythology, particularly in her “Trojanus” work, in which the women of Troy are evoked through nipple-like white circles extending outward from the canvas. These protrusions may look sexy, but they’re also reminiscent of a spear—a pointed defensive tool designed to ward off suspicious eyes.
Sanchez, a lesbian and self-exiled foreigner, occupies an unusual position in Puerto Rico, having called the island home since 1971. She became famous in her native Cuba in the 1950s, then moved to New York to leave her legacy behind. She then fell into obscurity until the 2010s, being known primarily to Puerto Ricans.
In 2013, she gained a larger following outside of Puerto Rico after her work was exhibited at Artists Space in New York. She participated in the Venice Biennale in 2017, the same year the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of her paintings, and two years later she was the subject of retrospective exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio, the Phillips Collection and the Museo. Ponce Art. In 2024, she received more honors: a survey from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami and another appearance at the Venice Biennale.
Zilia Sánchez was born in Havana in 1926 to a Spanish father and a Cuban mother. Living in an upper echelon of painter Victor Manuel, Sánchez developed an early interest in creating art and continued to pursue it, graduating from the National Academy of Fine Arts of San Alejandro in 1947 .
She initially planned to become an architect but later shelved those plans. Sometimes, she said her conversion was simply because she disliked math and the precision associated with the profession; other times, she said the Cuban revolution put an end to those plans.
But she is more specific about the origins of her shape paintings, which she dates back to 1955. A sheet from her father’s death bed was hung to dry, and as it blew in the wind, she noticed that it created certain forms. “I saw the form that came out of it, and suddenly I saw the paper like a painting,” she once said.
Throughout the rest of the 1950s, she continued to create paintings that had more in common with the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism and Informal Art, both movements that emphasized messy brushstrokes. While researching conservation techniques and traveling to Spain, France and Italy, she received widespread attention for these works. Some of the paintings explicitly reference symbols associated with Afro-Cuban heritage.
Sometime in the early 1960s, Sanchez moved to New York, a city that, as art historian Christina Bryan Rosenberger once noted in the New York Times, american artThe United States is more tolerant than Cuba in its treatment of members of the gay community. She studied printmaking at Pratt Institute, partly as a way to earn a living and also worked as an illustrator.
The move to New York coincided with a drastic change in her painting. Her colors are no longer so dark and her brushstrokes less raw. Now, she’s opting for smoother canvases and grayer tones—a look that has clear similarities to minimalism.
Sanchez lived in Harlem for ten years. Then, dissatisfied with the city, she left New York for Puerto Rico, where she has lived since moving there in 1971. There her paintings became larger and more ambitious, and she continued to create them until the last years of her life, sometimes even with the help of assistants.
In 2017, the year her work appeared in a major survey of Latino and Latino artists at the Hammer Museum, Sanchez was devastated when Hurricane Maria struck her studio in Puerto Rico. according to T: The New York Times Style Magazinethe hurricane “devastated the interior of the small building and destroyed much of her life’s work.” But regardless, she remained resilient and slowly rebuilt her studio, where she continues to work.
Questioner time Two years later, in 2019, she said of the last thing that made her cry: “I was being recognized for my work.”
