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 schooling 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 displays. Early into her profession, Sánchez labored in set and communications design, creating imaginative backdrops for guerrilla theater teams within the Nineteen Fifties in the course of the Cuban revolution. Her portray sequence 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 finding out conservation on the Prado Museum.
Zilia Sánchez, “Eros” (1976/1998), acrylic on stretched canvas, 102 x 135 x 18 inches (259.1 x 342.9 x 45.7 cm)
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 type clashed with the Exhausting-edge and Minimalist currents of the mainstream artwork world. It was throughout this era that Sánchez started experimenting with stretching canvas over hand-crafted picket constructions to create the volumetric surfaces for which she would turn into most celebrated. Evocative of taut pores and skin and curvaceous corporeal types, her “erotic topologies” evinced a sensibility to the sinuous rhythms of the pure world and their echoes within the feminine physique.
“This is an egg, it’s the world, and it’s a breast. Three things,” Sánchez mentioned in a 2013 interview.
Lots of her work are titled after girls warriors and heroines of Greek mythology, akin 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 largely white, grey, and muted colours, with their allusive geometries that go away ample room for interpretation, invite humor, fluidity, and pleasure.
Zilia Sánchez in her studio, San Juan, 2014 (photograph by Raquel Perez Puig)
Within the Nineteen Seventies, Sánchez relocated completely to Puerto Rico, the place she pursued this visible language on an enormous scale by creating murals for a gaggle of condominium 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 price of labor. A bunch of her former artwork college students helped her reconstruct the area, 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 repeatedly represented in marquee auctions of Latin American artwork, the artist’s works had been comparatively unknown in america all through a lot of her profession. One among her work was included within the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil in 1959, nevertheless it was not till a long time later, in 2017, that her work was proven on the Venice Biennale. One among 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.
Set up view of Zilia Sánchez: Heróicas Eróticas at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York in 2014
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 often say, ‘I am an island. Understand it and walk away.’ The earth and the rocks are solid, but they don’t float,” Sánchez mentioned, quoted in a press release shared by Galerie Lelong. “I like to float and feel free.”
The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan will current Topologías / Topologies, a solo exhibition that originated on the Institute of Modern Artwork Miami, in spring 2025.
Sánchez is survived by her associate, Victoria Ruiz.
