Zilia SÁnchez (1926–2024)
157Dec. 26, 2024
Cuban MinimalistZilia Sánchez, whose erotic shaped canvases offered a warm rebuttal to the often chilly work of her male counterparts, has died. She was ninety-eight. Her death was announced by the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, which did not specify a cause. Long a resident of Puerto Rico, where she settled following the Cuban Revolution, Sánchez gained recognition only near the end of her life, as feminist oeuvres finally began to be reconsidered. The artist over her long career brought to bear her early training as a set designer in spare, three-dimensional works that, on close looking, frequently evoked female anatomy. Stretched over complex wooden frameworks and swelling with protuberances, these canvases were almost sculptural in appearance, their subdued blue or gray hues lending them a dim sultriness. “A voluptuous sensuality is never far away,” wrote Barry Schwabsky in a 2014 issue ofArtforum. “Touch is as important as vision, and the paintings seem to want to touch themselves.”
“I paint with feeling,” she told an interviewer for the Phillips Collection in 2019, “and the feeling is inside. That’s how art is.”
Zilia Sánchez was born in Havana on July 12, 1928, to a Cuban mother and a Spanish father. After graduating from Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Alejandro, she began her career amid a politically radical milieu, working as a set designer and an abstract painter for Cuban theater groups. During this time, she gained renown as a painter in Havana and exhibited abroad, representing Cuba in the Bienal de México in 1958 and the Bienal de São Paulo in 1959. Following the rise to power of Fidel Castro, Sánchez traveled through Europe, in Spain encountering the work of Antoni Tàpies, which would prove influential to her own practice. In 1962, she moved to New York, where she studied printmaking at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and honed the shaped canvases that would become her trademark.
In the early 1970s, having enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, in 1966 and 1970, she settled permanently San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she designed the avant-garde literary journalZona Carga y Descarga(Zone of Charging and Discharging), and continued to produce the shaped paintings for which she would eventually become known. Works such asTroyanas(Trojan Women), 1964;Topología erótica(Erotic Topology), 1968;Antigone, 1970; andLunar(Moon), 1985; variously evoked sensuality and struggle beneath their smooth surfaces, tantalizing clefts, and inviting valleys. “Her work blatantly evokes the female body—nipples, lips (vaginal or otherwise), and so on—but it is not representational,” wrote Schwabsky. “That it can be at once so in-your-face and so indirect is probably its greatest strength.”
Sánchez’s work was well known in Puerto Rico, where she not only painted but taught for decades, from the 1990s working as professor at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico. She also taught at the Art Students League of San Juan. It wasn’t until the 2010s that Sánchez finally began receiving her due internationally. A 2013 exhibition at Artists Space in New York promptedNew York Timescritic Holland Cotter to wonder, “Why wasn’t this artist included in the Venice Biennale?” Sánchez went on to exhibit in the 2017 Biennale. A major survey of her work originated at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, in 2019, before traveling to the Museo de Arte Ponce in San Juan and El Museo del Barrio, New York. Her work is held in the collections of major institutions around the world including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Santurce; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Though some might have marveled at Sánchez’s persistence as she for decades continued to create work that might never be widely seen, or seen at all, for the artist there was no mystery. “Why am I still making work?” she replied to her Phillips Collection interlocutor in 2019. “Because I need it.”