Sarah Grilo (Buenos Aires 1919 – Madrid 2007) was one of the most important women in Latin American art of the second half of the 20th century.
She conducted her first painting studies with the Spanish painter Vicente Puig in her hometown of Buenos Aires. She lived in France and England and, after obtaining the J.S. Guggenheim in 1961, she moved to New York. In 1970 she moved to Spain, where she lived until her death in 2007.
In 1952 she formed the Group of Modern Artists together with Tomás Maldonado, Enio Iommi, José Antonio Fernández Muro, Lidy Prati, among others. The group held exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam before disbanding in 1957.
Upon receiving a J. S. Guggenheim fellowship in 1961, Grilo moved to New York City and from that moment on her work took a radical turn. Grilo broke with her experience in concrete abstraction and began to incorporate, through her own formal means, the urban references that surrounded her: from the graffiti that covered the walls of the city, to the strokes of letters, numbers and symbols of different fonts and typographies displayed on the advertising posters that papered the streets of the city. Grilo’s appropriations during his stay in New York in the 1960s continued to define his work throughout the following decades, while maintaining an acute sensitivity to color manifesting itself in his use of saturations of various tones and nuances in his highly lyrical and gestural compositions. If we want to define Sarah Grilo’s works in musical categories, we could say that her works on paper can be considered chamber compositions, while her works on canvas could be described as symphonic.
Her work is part of numerous museums, institutions and private collections in Latin America, the United States and Europe.
She has exhibited individually and collectively in countless galleries, museums and institutions around the world, among others: National Museum of Fine Arts, Buenos Aires (MNBA); Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami; Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam; Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas; Institute of Contemporary Art, Lima; Museum of Contemporary Art of Latin America, Washington DC; The Nelson Rockefeller Collection, New York; University of Texas Art Museum; Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid; Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum, Madrid.
In 2017, Sarah Grilo’s work Add, 1965 (recently acquired by the museum), was part of the exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.