Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez, whose dimensional work bridge geometric abstraction and eroticism, died at 98 on Wednesday, December 18. The information of her demise was confirmed by Galerie Lelong in New York, her representing gallery since 2013.
Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1926, Sánchez was uncovered to artwork at a younger age: Her father was a hobbyist painter and artist Víctor Manuel was her neighbor and mentor. After receiving her training within the metropolis’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, the nation’s oldest and most acclaimed establishment, she started exhibiting in group and solo shows. Early into her profession, Sánchez labored in set and communications design, creating imaginative backdrops for guerrilla theater teams within the Fifties in the course of the Cuban revolution. Her portray collection Afrocubanos (1956–58) investigated African traditions and rituals instrumental to the event of Palo, the diasporic faith born following the Atlantic slave commerce, by way of crisp strains, daring shapes, and grey and yellow palettes. Sánchez additionally labored as a graphic designer for the Spanish publication Zona Carga y Descarga (1972–75) and spent a yr in Spain learning conservation on the Prado Museum.
Sánchez relocated to New York Metropolis within the early Nineteen Sixties, within the wake of Fidel Castro’s rise to energy in Cuba. There, her sensual, biomorphic fashion clashed with the Laborious-edge and Minimalist currents of the mainstream artwork world. It was throughout this era that Sánchez started experimenting with stretching canvas over hand-crafted wood constructions to create the volumetric surfaces for which she would develop into most celebrated. Evocative of taut pores and skin and curvaceous corporeal kinds, her “erotic topologies” evinced a sensibility to the sinuous rhythms of the pure world and their echoes within the feminine physique.
“That is an egg, it’s the world, and it’s a breast. Three issues,” Sánchez stated in a 2013 interview.
Lots of her work are titled after ladies warriors and heroines of Greek mythology, corresponding to Antigone, whose story of resistance and defiance resonated with Sánchez’s personal experiences of political exile and being a homosexual lady artist in male-dominated areas. Her modular sculptural canvases in principally white, grey, and muted colours, with their allusive geometries that depart ample room for interpretation, invite humor, fluidity, and pleasure.
Within the Seventies, Sánchez relocated completely to Puerto Rico, the place she pursued this visible language on an enormous scale by creating murals for a bunch of condo constructing facades. Hurricane Maria tore by way of the archipelago in September 2017, ripping off the roof of her studio within the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan and destroying a long time value of labor. A gaggle of her former artwork college students helped her reconstruct the house, and the artist persevered to create a brand new oeuvre that included freestanding sculptures exhibited at Galerie Lelong in 2019.
Although Sánchez has been the topic of main exhibitions in recent times and is commonly represented in marquee auctions of Latin American artwork, the artist’s works have been comparatively unknown in the US all through a lot of her profession. Considered one of her work was included within the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1959, but it surely was not till a long time later, in 2017, that her work was proven on the Venice Biennale. Considered one of Sánchez’s signature moon-shaped items, “Lunar” (1980), was included within the Central Pavilion exhibition of this yr’s Biennale, Foreigners In every single place.
In 2019, the Phillips Assortment in Washington, DC, mounted Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island), a solo exhibition of the artist’s work that traveled to El Museo del Barrio in New York and Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. The title was drawn from the artist’s poetic self-characterization, referencing each her literal upbringing in Cuba and Puerto Rico and her oscillating state of distance from and deep connection to her environment.
“I typically say, ‘I’m an island. Perceive it and stroll away.’ The earth and the rocks are stable, however they don’t float,” Sánchez stated, quoted in an announcement shared by Galerie Lelong. “I prefer to float and be happy.”
The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan will current Topologías / Topologies, a solo exhibition that originated on the Institute of Up to date Artwork Miami, in spring 2025.
Sánchez is survived by her companion, Victoria Ruiz.
