Galerie Lelong & Co. is presenting for the first time a selection of works on paper by the Argentinean artist Sarah Grilo (1919 – 2007). These works, created in Madrid between 1970 and 1990, are among the most emblematic of her output. They illustrate her emancipation from the group of abstract painters, the “Artistas Modernos de la Argentina” with whom she started her career and demonstrate her creative freedom. Moving away from the geometric abstraction that characterised her early production, these compositions clearly convey the agitation of modern urban life. Words, letters, numbers and graffiti appear, overlap, combine and are a visual transposition of how the noises, colours and forms of the big city appeared to her when she arrived in Manhattan in 1957.
Sin título (1991), Oil on paper / Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris
Sarah Grilo is a major figure of Latin-American art of the second half of the 20th Century. She worked in Buenos Aires, Paris, New York and Madrid. Her work has been the subject of a number of one-man shows in the US, Latin America and Europe: at the national fine arts museum in Buenos Aires, the fine arts museum in Caracas, the Institut de Arte Contemporáneo of Lima, the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami, the American Art Museum in Washington DC, the Nelson Rockefeller collection in New York, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. In 2017, Grilo’s work featured in the "Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction" exhibition at the MoMA in New York.
Sin título (1978), Oil on paper / Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris