Late Painter Sarah Grilo’s Abstractions Are Finally Getting Their Due

The 1960s was a radical decade for the New York art scene. Recently crowned the epicenter of the Western art world—thanks to the Abstract Expressionists who rose to fame in the 1950s—the city fostered avant-garde movements including Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. It was against this backdrop in 1962, with political upheaval across much of the globe, that Argentine artist Sarah Grilo moved to New York, a decision that proved to be formative.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1917, Grilo became a leading artist in Argentina before earning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 and moving to the U.S. the following year. She remained in New York until 1970 when her opposition to the Vietnam War draft led her to move with her family to the south of Spain. She then worked in Madrid and Paris until settling in Madrid in 1985, where she stayed until her death in 2007. Throughout her six-decade career, Grilo’s work was exhibited in group shows worldwide. Despite this success, she is not well known within the canon of art history: When she’s received attention, it’s been as a Latin American artist rather than for her contributions to abstraction.

A new exhibition at Galerie Lelong & Co. aims to correct this. Focusing on Grilo’s time in New York, “Sarah Grilo: The New York Years, 1962–70” illustrates how she developed her abstract style. Curated by Karen Grimson, an art historian whose dissertation focused on the artist, the show includes several works that have not been exhibited publicly since Grilo’s solo show at Byron Gallery in New York in 1967. Presented alongside a selection of archival materials, including newspaper clippings featuring her work and photographs of the artist with figures like Andy Warhol, the exhibition offers an intimate look into Grilo’s practice and social milieu during her time in the U.S.

Before moving to New York, Grilo had focused on color and geometric shapes. As she developed her voice in the city, she began incorporating text physically transferred from American magazines, recalling the Pop artists of the day, as well as collage, her own handwriting, and layers of oil paint. Her body of work from 1963 shows elements of this shift. Some include bold, abstract compositions characteristic of her earlier pieces, such as Pines, Ochres and Green and Orange and mauve (both 1963). In these, she explored color and brushwork techniques, applying paint in several layers, some thin and washy with visible drips, and some thick, almost gritty, seemingly applied with a flat object like a palette knife.

Two years later, she painted Charts are dull. With a gray, chalkboard-like background and foreground covered in layers of paint and text, the work is visually complex, resembling a graffitied city wall. The text, inspired by and sometimes quoting from American mass media, includes legible words such as “Vogue,” “truth,” and “exciting,” as well as a glimpse of the work’s title. With words and symbols overlapping, truncated, and obscured by layers of paint, the composition recalls the visual overload of urban life.

Grilo’s interest in mass media connects her with the legacy of postwar artists who used their work to address critical issues. As language became increasingly visible in her work, so too did Grilo’s social and political messages. In Win, it’s great for your ego (ca. 1965–66), for instance, she included the word “war” and repeated references to ego and winning, possibly allusions to the Vietnam War. Interspersed are illegible symbols, letters, and numbers.