Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Sarah Grilo, The New York Years, 1962–70, the late artist’s first with the gallery. Curated by Karen Grimson, the exhibition will focus on a pivotal period in the artist’s practice, charting the emergence of her distinct style fusing abstraction with language.
Sarah Grilo’s arrival in New York in 1962, following her receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship, came at a time of intense political upheaval that mirrored visual experimentation, and imbued the artist with a deepened desire to create. Grilo’s works reflect this disruption and creativity. Influenced in part by her attraction to U.S. illustrated publications such as LIFE and women’s magazines, Grilo assimilated language, collage, and text in her paintings. Working with collage and transfer of text, Grilo isolated phrases such as America’s going…; Our heroes; and Win, it’s great for your ego, marrying abstraction and drawing with subtle social commentary. Grilo’s use of text sourced from U.S. mass media is even more intriguing considering English was a foreign language for the artist.
About the Artist
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, partly in opposition to the draft for the United States’s involvement in the war in Vietnam, 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.
In her lifetime, Grilo exhibited in galleries and museums internationally and her work has been collected by numerous institutions, including 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.
