This week in Newly Reviewed, Holland Cotter covers the Studio Museum in Harlem’s residency results at MoMA PS1 and Sarah Grilo’s little-seen paintings at Galerie Lelong in New York.
Sarah Grilo, America’s going… (1967), oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 26 inches (© The Estate of Sarah Grilo; image courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.)
The painter Sarah Grilo (1917-2007) was born in Buenos Aires and spent most of her life in Europe. But a Guggenheim fellowship brought her to New York City in 1962, and an eight-year stay here transformed her art, as demonstrated in this fine survey of little-seen paintings — “The New York Years, 1962–70” — organized by Karen Grimson.
Grilo arrived here as a purely abstract painter and stayed one for a while, as the 1963 “Green Painting,” with its brushy blocks of emerald and aquamarine, attests. But the United States, racially divided and headed toward war in Asia, was in a manic mood, and New York was New York, always jacked to the max. Those environmental factors, along with an art world in which Pop was huge and abstraction in retreat, shook up her work.
Her paint application began to get lighter and looser but wired. And she began to add a new element: language, in the form of headlines cut from news magazines. These words and phrases — “Our heroes,” “Win, it’s great for your ego” — filter up from tangles of paint. In 2017 Grilo had a memorable moment with the inclusion of a painting in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction.” The work is on view in the museum’s permanent collection galleries, and it’s great to have a context for it in this fuller sampling at Lelong.
Read it here.