Sarah Grilo

Biography

Sarah Grilo’s first solo exhibition took place in Madrid in 1949. She showed works in which figuration was mixed with traces of Cubism. Three years later the same artist exhibited as part of a group that called itself Artistas Modernos de la Argentina (Modern Artists of Argentina).

She was born in Buenos Aires. Her year of birth is given variously as 1917, 1919 or 1920, so I keep to the milestones that do not depend on the date. She began as a self-taught artist. In 1944 she started working in the studio of the Catalan artist Vicente Puig, which many Argentine painters attended. There she met José Antonio Fernández-Muro, also an artist, whom she married.

In 1947 the family moved to Europe and settled first in Madrid, intending to move on to Paris in time. The plan fell through: in 1949 money stopped being sent from Buenos Aires because of a ban on taking currency out of the country, and in 1950 Grilo returned to Argentina.

By then her painting was becoming more and more abstract. In 1952, at the invitation of the critic Aldo Pellegrini, she joined Artistas Modernos de la Argentina, whose members included Enio Iommi, Alfredo Hlito, Tomás Maldonado, Lidy Prati and her husband. The group exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro until it dissolved in 1954. In an interview that year Grilo said that painting should express its own time and reach its greatest expressiveness within the most innovative tendencies. In 1956 she took part in the Venice Biennale.

In 1957 she settled in Paris with her husband, where she attended Pierre Francastel’s seminar at the Sorbonne; in those years, until 1961, her work became more lyrical. In 1960 Jorge Romero Brest, then director of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, invited her, together with her husband, Clorindo Testa, Miguel Ocampo and Kazuya Sakai, to an exhibition in the country’s main museum. Marta Traba called these five the most serious and responsible team Argentine painting of their generation had produced. Back in Buenos Aires, in 1961 she took part in the Torcuato Di Tella Foundation prize.

She then received a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved with her family to New York, where she lived for about eight years. She exhibited at the Bianchini, Byron and Bonino galleries, and also in Washington. Here she gradually moved away from geometric abstraction: coloured surfaces, drips, numbers, words, inscriptions from city walls and letters from torn posters entered her pictures. All this lay in layers, in apparent disorder, but with a very refined colour sense. She said herself that she wanted to leave behind the purely formal abstract “arrangement” of colour and texture. Romero Brest saw in these works a kind of neo-realist Impressionism with urban motifs. In 1968 she won the acquisition prize at the first Ibero-American Painting Biennial in Medellín.

In 1970 the family moved to the south of Spain. In 1972 Grilo exhibited at the Juana Mordó gallery in Madrid. After fifteen years of absence she showed her graffiti works in Buenos Aires, at the Galería Art, in 1978. From 1980 she divided her time between Paris and Madrid, where she settled for good in 1985 (according to other accounts, in 1989). In 1985 the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid mounted a solo exhibition of her work from 1979 to 1985.

Her work has been shown by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin and the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid. After her death it appeared in the exhibitions “Making Space” (New York, 2017) and “Action, Gesture, Paint” (London, 2023).

Grilo died in Madrid in 2007, still painting in her last years.