Current visitors to the MoMA or the Metropolitan Museum in New York may be surprised to see paintings that they cannot immediately identify hanging alongside those by Tàpies and Rothko. These are paintings by Sarah Grilo, which have recently been added to these collections. The artist, who died nearly twenty years ago, is finally receiving the recognition she deserves.
Sarah Grilo was born in Buenos Aires in 1917. In the 1950s, she began creating figurative works influenced by Cubism. She quickly evolved towards geometric abstraction when she joined the "Artistas Modernos de la Argentina" group, which exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museo d’Arte Moderno in Rio de Janeiro.
From 1954 to 1961, Sarah Grilo lived in Paris, where her abstract work took on a more lyrical dimension. She was able to move to New York in 1962 thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work took a decisive turn inspired by her immersion in a new urban landscape and her discovery of the American art of the period. These vibrant surfaces are animated by the flashing lights of signs and advertisements, with numbers, letters, graffiti and advertising slogans mingling with drips of paint. Sarah Grilo continued to develop this new visual language in Paris and Madrid from 1970 until her death in 2007.
The exhibition presents works from the 1970s and 1980s, during which time the artist worked alternately in Paris and Spain (Madrid, Marbella). She liked to play with permutations, fragmentations and reversals of elements. In her mind, this was linked to the mathematical observation: "El orden de los factores no altera el producto" (the order of the factors does not alter the product), which she used as the title of one of her paintings: "Desorden de los factores".
Galerie Lelong presented two exhibitions of the artist’s work in Paris in 2018 and 2021. In 2024, the Galerie Lelong in New York exhibited paintings from her New York years. Works by the artist thereby entered the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Sarah Grilo’s work is also becoming increasingly prominent in Europe; it is featured in the exhibition "Miró and the United States", currently on display at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona (and later at the Phillips Collection in Washington). The Juan March Foundation in Palma de Mallorca will be devoting a retrospective to her in 2026.
