Sarah Grilo 1917-2007

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.