Sarah Grilo

Sarah Grilo (Buenos Aires 1919 – Madrid 2007) is a major figure of Latin-American art of the second half of the 20th Century.

She was born in 1919 in Buenos Aires, where she first studied painting with the Spanish painter Vicente Puig. She lived in France and England and, after obtaining the JS Guggenheim Foundation scholarship in 1961, moved to New York. In 1970 she moved to Spain, where she lived until her death in 2007.

In 1952 she formed the Grupo de Artistas Modernos (Group of Modern Artists) together with Tomás Maldonado, Enio Iommi, José Antonio Fernández Muro and Lidy Prati, among others. Before its dissolution in 1957, the group held exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Río de Janeiro and the Stedelijk Art Museum in Amsterdam.

Upon receiving a J. S. Guggenheim Fellowship IN 1961, Grilo moved to New York City and it was at this point that her work took a radical turn. Grilo broke from her background in Concrete Abstraction, and began to incorporate – through her own unconscious formal means – the urban references that surrounded her: from the graffiti that ran rampant throughout the city’s walls, to the traces of letters, numbers, and symbols in various fonts and typographies that peeled off the posters plastered around the city streets.

Grilo’s appropriations during her stay in 1960s New York continued to define her work over the course of the remaining decades, all while maintaining an acute sensibility to color in her highly lyrical and gestural compositions. Grilo’s works then and in the proceeding decades, all sustained a hyper-chromatic sensibility as manifested by her use of saturations of various tonalities and hues.

Her work has been the subject of a number of group and solo exhibitions in the United States, Latin America and Europe, among others at the: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, New York; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami; Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Nelson Rockefeller Collection, New York, United States; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Latinoamericano, La Plata, Argentina; Museo Genaro Pérez, Cordoba, Argentina; Galería Bonino, Buenos Aires, Argentina and New York, USA; Galería Jacques Martínez, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela; Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo, Lima, Perú; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Fundación CajaCanarias, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain; Fundación Luis Seoane, La Corogne, Spain; Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris, France.

In 2017, Grilo’s work Add (recently acquired by the museum), was featured in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction an exhibition held at The Museum of Modern Art, (MoMA) in New York.