Sarah Grilo

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1919 - 2007

            From her earliest works exhibited at the Palma Gallery in Madrid in 1949, Grilo demonstrated an alliance that would become a defining feature of her poetics: the lasting influence of training in the abstract language of modern painting, alongside a conception of painting as something open—like a suction cup capable of absorbing, metabolizing, and returning the material and cultural forces of its environment onto the canvas. Thus, oscillating between Informalism, geometric and concrete art, and the Expressionism of the New Figuration, her work reconciled the material lyricism of her contemporaries with the discipline of a formal grammar cultivated in modernist language. Gesture and line, color and plane were not opposing forces in her work, but rather joint efforts on a shared compositional field.

            This absorptive capacity in her painting gained particular strength upon her arrival in New York in the early 1960s, after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship. The political upheaval and visual experimentation of the New York art scene permeated her work with unusual chromatic intensities and linguistic interventions that challenged the idea of pure painting. Her work began incorporating press clippings, mass-media magazines, textual transfers using the slang of the time—even graffiti—transforming the language of color and form into a sharp external commentary on American society and its hegemony. The transition from the 1960s to the 1970s saw her relocate to Spain, where she lived until her final days. Within a tradition historically dominated by men, she represented an exceptional sensitivity in expanding the repertoire of pictorial solutions for the increasingly impure space of painting. She extended her visual tools by bringing the brushstroke into the realm of typography and calligraphy, liberating gesture, and turning the canvas into a palimpsest of communal graphic information and subjective traces.

            Her work was exhibited in major international museums and is part of the collections of prestigious institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; the Nelson Rockefeller Collection (New York); the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires (Argentina); and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.