Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez, whose dimensional paintings bridge the gap between geometric abstraction and eroticism, died on Wednesday, December 18 at the age of 98. The news of her death was confirmed by Galerie Lelong in New York, her representative gallery since 2013.
Sánchez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1926 and came into contact with art at an early age: her father was a hobby painter and artist Víctor Manuel was her neighbor and mentor. After training at the city’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, the country’s oldest and most acclaimed institution, she began exhibiting in group and solo presentations. Early in her career, Sánchez worked in set and communications design, creating imaginative backdrops for guerrilla theater groups in the 1950s, during the Cuban Revolution. Her painting series Afrocubanos (1956–58) explored African traditions and rituals that played an important role in the development of Palo, the diaspora religion that emerged after the Atlantic slave trade, through sharp lines, bold shapes, and gray and yellow palettes. Sánchez also worked as a graphic designer for the Spanish publication Zona Carga and Descarga (1972–75) and spent a year in Spain studying conservation at the Prado Museum.
Sánchez moved to New York City in the early 1960s, in the wake of Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba. There her sensual, biomorphic style clashed with the hard and minimalist movements of the mainstream art world. It was during this period that Sánchez began experimenting with stretching canvas over handmade wooden structures to create the volumetric surfaces for which she would be most celebrated. Her “erotic topologies‘ demonstrated a sensitivity to the sinuous rhythms of the natural world and their echoes in the female body.
‘This is an egg, it is the world, and it is a breast. Three things,” Sánchez said in one Interview from 2013.
Many of her paintings are named after female warriors and heroines from Greek mythology, such as Antigone, whose story of defiance and defiance resonated with Sánchez’s own experiences of political exile and being a gay artist in male-dominated spaces. Her modular sculptural canvases in mainly white, gray and muted colors, with their allusive geometries that leave plenty of room for interpretation, invite humor, fluidity and fun.
In the 1970s, Sánchez moved permanently to Puerto Rico, where she pursued this visual language on a large scale by creating murals for a group of facades of apartment buildings. Hurricane Maria tore through the archipelago in September 2017, ripping off the roof of her studio in San Juan’s Santurce neighborhood and destroying decades of work. A group of her former art students helped her reconstruct the space, and the artist persevered to create a new body of work that includes freestanding sculptures. on display at Galerie Lelong in 2019.
Although Sánchez has been the subject of major exhibitions in recent years and is regularly represented in marquee auctions of Latin American art, the artist’s works were relatively unknown in the United States for much of her career. One of her paintings was included in the 1959 São Paulo Biennale in Brazil, but it was not until decades later, in 2017, that her work was shown at the Venice Biennale. One of Sánchez’s signature moon-shaped pieces: “Moon” (1980), was included in the Central Pavilion exhibition of this year’s Biennale, Foreigners everywhere.
In 2019, the Phillips Collection was mounted in Washington, DC 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 is taken from the artist’s poetic self-characterization, which refers both to her literal upbringing in Cuba and Puerto Rico and to her oscillating state of distance from and deep connection with her environment.
“I often say: ‘I am an island. Understand and walk away.” The earth and the rocks are solid, but they do not float,” Sánchez said, quoted in a statement shared by Galerie Lelong. “I like to float and feel free.”
The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan will give a presentation Topologies / Topologiesa solo exhibition that emerged at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, in the spring of 2025.
Sánchez is survived by her partner, Victoria Ruiz.
