
In October 2018, Galerie Lelong & Co. presented an inaugural selection of works on paper by the Argentinian artist, Sarah Grilo. For many visitors, she was a discovery. This new exhibition focuses on her canvasesfrom the 1980s and 1990s; compositions that incorporate graffiti, figures and letters or extracts of words. In them,we can feel the hectic pace of the city, the flashing of advertising hoardings. The symbols buried in the rivulets ofliquid paint form a sort of palimpsest where we can attempt to decipher the details of daily life, a date, an address,a phone number amidst a crooked ensemble of arrows and geometric figures. We can almost hear the noises ofthe city, see the lights and their reflections, the work bathed in the melancholy of dripping colour.
Sarah Grilo is a major figure of Latin-American art from the second half of the 20th century. She has worked in Buenos Aires, Paris, New York and Madrid. Her work has been the subject of a number of one-manshows in the US, Latin America and Europe: at the national fine arts museum in Buenos Aires, the fine arts museumin Caracas, the Institut de Arte Contemporáneo of Lima, the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York, theCisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami, the American Art Museum in Washington DC, the NelsonRockefeller collection in New York, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam,the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. Recently, in 2017, Grilo’s work featured in the Making Space: Women Artistsand Postwar Abstraction exhibition at the MoMA in New York.
B. 1919, Buenos Aires, Argentina–d. Madrid, Spain, 2007 Born in Buenos Aires in 1919, Sarah Grilo began her early studies in painting with the renowned Spanish artist, Vicente Puig. Grilo lived in Argentina, France and Spain before receiving a J. S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, and subsequently moved to New York. In 1970, the artist left for the south of Spain, where she would stay until 1979 with her husband, the painter José Antonio Fernández-Muro, and their children. From 1980 she alternated her stay between Paris and Madrid, where she definitely moved to live with her husband in 1985, until her death in 2007.


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