Fanny Sanín

Biography

In 2017 the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington showed the exhibition “Equilibrium: Fanny Sanín”. It included finished geometric compositions and also whole series of preliminary drawings for them, which show how each work is built up.

Sanín was born in Bogotá in 1938. Her father, Gabriel Sanín Tobón, a native of Antioquia, worked as an accountant and was secretary of the Liberal Party; her mother, Fanny Sader Guerra, kept house and came from a family of Syrian-Lebanese origin that had first settled in Venezuela. The artist later joked that on the Sanín side the family was Liberal and on the Sader side Conservative. The house was full of books and music, and her father brought in drawing teachers for the girls. Together with her sister Rosa, who also became an artist, Fanny enrolled in 1956 in the fine arts programme at the University of the Andes; it was her sister who insisted on it. She took her Master of Fine Arts there in 1960. Her teachers are named as David Manzur Londoño and Armando Villegas. Then came printmaking and art history at the University of Illinois, and in the late 1960s, while living in London, courses in engraving at the Chelsea School of Art. Her early abstract pieces are closer to Abstract Expressionism; she came to her geometric manner later.

Sanín herself names Ellsworth Kelly, Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Matisse among those she looked to. Critics compare her with Carmen Herrera and Lygia Clark. She is counted among the second generation of Colombian abstract artists.

Museum collections began early. In 1993 the painting “Acrylic No. 6” entered the permanent collection of the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington. Later, works by Sanín were acquired by the Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez in Mexico (2003), El Museo del Barrio in New York (2011), the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2011), the Museo La Tertulia in Cali (2013) and the Museo Nacional de Colombia (2015), as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2017 she gave the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, the painting “Acrylic No. 1” (2005), in honour of the art historian Edward J. Sullivan; the museum also acquired three studies for it. Among group exhibitions: the Pinta art fair (2007); “Abstracción y Constructivismo: Continuidad y ruptura de la modernidad Latinoamericana” (“Abstraction and Constructivism: Continuity and Rupture of Latin American Modernity”) at the Durban Segnini Gallery (2015); and “Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2023). In the summer of 2025 the Americas Society in New York showed the exhibition “Fanny Sanín: Geometric Equations”, with a catalogue of the same name. Earlier, in 2019, the book “Fanny Sanín: The Concrete Language of Color and Structure” appeared.

Awards: the Colombia Award in Art (1993) and the Premio Colombia Exterior for excellence (2006). In February 2015 the University of Antioquia conferred on her an honorary master’s degree in art.