Biografia
Sarah Grilo (Buenos Aires, 1919-New York, 2007) is an important Latin American painter of the 20th century, especially in postwar abstract art. Living in New York, she appropriated the graffiti on the city's walls, the typographic letters, the numbers and the spontaneous lines.
She studied in the workshop of the Catalan painter Vicente Puig. In the beginning, her work was figurative, with some cubist strokes. She painted lots of landscapes, still lifes and forms. She joined the group formed by Aldo Pellegrini of nonfigurative artists named Artistas Modernos. Those made some exhibitions, the first one at the gallery Viau of Buenos Aires, in Rio de Janeiro and Amsterdam, until the dissolution in 1955.
She participated in the Venice Biennale in 1956, and with her husband and artist José Antonio Fernández-Muro, moved to Paris for five years. They came back to Argentina and Sara Grilo won the John Simon Scholarship of the Guggenheim Foundation, and moved to New York, where she exhibited in different galleries. In New York she started a series that she would abandon, following her words: “the pure formal-critic-material totally abstract”. She took inspiration from the graffiti of the walls of the city, the topographic letters, and the numbers to create her new works. In 1970, she lived in Madrid with her husband and her sons, and exhibited her works made in New York in the Juana Mordó Gallery. After that, she travelled to Buenos Aires, where after 15 years of absence, made an exhibition at the Galería Art in 1978.
She contributed to the most important art contests, in Sao Paolo, Venice, and Medellín, and her work is exhibited in the most known contemporary art museums, like the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, the Reina Sofia Museum of Madrid, or the Nelson Rockefeller Collection of New York. Her work also has been exhibited in the most known fairs like ARCO Madrid and Buenos Aires, and collective expositions as the Latin American Art Today at the Trinity School of New York in 1964, the Expo 68, in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968, the Droits Socialistes de l'Homme at the Grand Palais of Paris in 1982, or one of the most recent, Making Space: Women Artist and Postwar Abstraction at the MoMA, of New York, in 2017.
