Sarah Grilo

Sarah Grilo was an Argentine painter who lived in Buenos Aires, New York, Paris and Madrid, and is regarded as one of the leading Latin American figures of postwar abstract art. She began as a self-taught artist and then worked in the studio of the Catalan painter Vicente Puig, a place frequented by Argentine artists in the 1930s. After a period in Madrid with her husband, the painter José Antonio Fernández-Muro, she held her first solo show there in 1949, with figurative works showing traces of Cubism.

Back in Argentina in 1950, she joined Artistas Modernos de la Argentina, a group led by Aldo Pellegrini whose exhibitions travelled to Rio de Janeiro and Amsterdam. In the 1960s, while living in New York, she began to incorporate graffiti and cut-out lettering from urban posters into her canvases, creating an apparent disorder with a highly refined sense of colour. From 1970 she lived in southern Spain, and in 1989 she settled permanently in Madrid, where she kept painting until her death in 2007. Her work has been shown at institutions such as MoMA in New York and the Reina Sofía, and in 2017 it featured in the group exhibition Making Space at MoMA.