Sarah Grilo

Black wall, 1967
The Metropolitan Museum of Art; purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2024

In a career spanning three continents and six decades, Sarah Grilo created paintings and works on paper in a distinctive style fusing abstraction with language. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1917, Grilo was a member of the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina in the 1950s before her receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 prompted a move to New York the following year. It was there that Grilo developed her signature visual language. Influenced in part by her introduction and attraction to U.S. illustrated publications such as LIFE and women’s magazines, Grilo used transfer techniques to assimilate language and text in her paintings. Sourcing materials directly from popular print publications, Grilo created paintings that reflect and resonate with the world in which they were produced.

In 1970, Grilo and her family moved to the south of Spain where she continued her approach of gestural abstraction and text. Throughout the early ‘80s, Grilo lived and worked between Madrid and Paris, settling in Madrid in 1985, where she remained until her death in 2007.
"Things are constantly happening that can be incorporated as abstractions… you don't need more than to look out the window or head out to the streets. Always with an alert gaze."
—Sarah Grilo
Win, it's great for your ego, c. 1965-66

In her lifetime, Grilo exhibited in galleries and museums internationally and her work has been collected by numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA, New York; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her paintings have been included in recent museum shows including Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at MoMA, New York (2017) and Action, Gesture, Paint | Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70 at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2022).

Sarah Grilo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1917, and died in Madrid, Spain, in 2007.

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- Exhibitions
  Sarah Grilo: The New York Years, 1962–70
  8 February - 30 March 2024 Galerie Lelong Exhibitions
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Publications
- Publications
  Sarah Grilo: The New York Years, 1962–70
  Karen Grimson
  This catalogue, the first volume focused on the work of the late artist Sarah Grilo, documents the exhibition Sarah Grilo: The New York Years, 1962–70 . This presentation focused on...
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