Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez died on Wednesday, December 18, at the age of 98. Her three-dimensional paintings connect geometric abstraction with eroticism. New York-based Galerie Lelong, which had represented her since 2013, confirmed her death.
Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1926, Sánchez was introduced to art at a young age: her father was an amateur painter, and the artist Víctor Manuel was her neighbor and mentor. After receiving her education at the city’s National Academy of Fine Arts of San Alejandro, the country’s oldest and most acclaimed institution, she began participating in group and solo exhibitions. Early in his career, Sanchez worked in set and communications design, creating imaginative backdrops for guerrilla theater troupes during the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s. her painting series Afro-Cuban (1956-58) Through clean lines, bold shapes, and a palette of grays and yellows, he examines African traditions and rituals that were crucial to the development of Palo, a religion that emerged in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade of diasporic religion. Sanchez also worked as a graphic designer for Spanish publications Loading Zone (1972-75) and spent a year studying conservation at the Prado Museum in Spain.
After Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in the early 1960s, Sanchez moved to New York City. There, her sensual, biomorphic style clashed with the hard edge and minimalist trends of the mainstream art world. It was during this period that Sanchez began experimenting with stretching canvas over handmade wooden structures to create the volumetric surfaces for which she is best known. Her “erotic topologies” evoke taut skin and curvaceous corporeal forms, expressing a sensitivity to the sinuous rhythms of the natural world and their echoes in the female body.
“This is an egg, this is a world, this is a breast. Three things,” Sanchez said in a 2013 interview.
Many of her paintings are named after female warriors and heroes from Greek mythology, such as Antigone, and her stories of resistance and defiance resonate with Sánchez’s own experience of political exile and that of a queer female artist in a male-dominated space . The suggestive geometries of her modular sculptural canvases, mostly in white, gray and muted colors, leave plenty of room for interpretation, bringing humor, flow and joy.
In the 1970s, Sanchez moved permanently to Puerto Rico, where she pursued this visual language on a large scale by creating murals for the facades of a group of apartment buildings. In September 2017, Hurricane Maria ripped through the archipelago, ripping the roof off her studio in the San Juan Turce neighborhood and destroying decades of her work. A group of her former art students helped her recreate the space, and the artist persisted to create a series of new works, including a freestanding sculpture exhibited at Galerie Lelong in 2019.
Although Sánchez has been the subject of major exhibitions in recent years and frequently appears at major auctions of Latin American art, for much of her career the artist’s work was relatively unknown in the United States. One of her works was selected for the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil in 1959, but it was not until decades later in 2017 that her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. One of Sánchez’s iconic moon-shaped works, “Moon” (1980), is included in this year’s Biennale’s central pavilion exhibition, There are foreigners everywhere.
2019 opens the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I am an island)solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at El Museo del Barrio in New York and Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. The title is taken from the artist’s poetic self-description, referring to her real-life upbringing in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and her oscillating state of distance and deep connection with her surroundings.
“I often say, ‘I am an island. Understand it and walk away. The earth and rocks are solid, but they do not float,” Sanchez was quoted as saying in a statement shared by Lelong Gallery. “I love the feeling of floating and being free.”
The Museum of Puerto Rican Art in San Juan will exhibit topology/topologya solo exhibition originating from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, will be held in the spring of 2025.
Sanchez is survived by her partner, Victoria Ruiz;
