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One night when Zilia Sánchez was a young woman in 1950s Cuba, she was sitting out on the roof of her parents’ house in Havana. There her mother had constructed a washing line, and Sánchez recalled seeing the drying bedsheets blow against a length of wood that protruded from the wall, the white material taking the form of the structure beneath. The memory of this accidental sculpture became an enduring influence on the artist’s paintings.
From the 60s onwards, mostly working out of the limelight, Sánchez, who has died aged 98, pulled and pushed the canvas beyond the frame, shaping the material around armatures into points and mounds.
“I began with flatness and continued with another dimension that resembles motion; it was a restless exploration, a quest for change,” she said. The results invariably possessed a fleshy, erotic sensibility.
Troyanas (1967) features a series of nine long, thin near-identical paintings in which the canvas, or “skin” to use Sánchez’s term, is stretched as if to form an angular breast. Placed side by side in series they represent, in very abstract form, the women of Troy lined up; one of many works to feature references to powerful female figures of antiquity, from Amazonians to Antigone. “When I made my Amazonas and Troyanas, I sensed them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, like an army of strengthened beauty, and it was a different vision of women.”
Sánchez made these works in 60s New York and she shares some of the minimalist sensibility fashionable in the US at the time – the artist was interested in how her paintings drew attention to the wider space in which it is seen, be it the light or the architecture. Her art, however, eschewed the prevailing industrial sensibility, and the artist’s feminist politics and interest in sensuality is established in the handmade quality of the work, a diversion from the cold precision of her male peers.
Eros (1976), in which a large slash appears along the horizontal length of the work, recalls that of Lucio Fontana, but in Sánchez’s hands, with a few deft abstract forms painted in pale blue and light peach against a cream background, the work makes a clear reference to the female labia. “I don’t think in form,” she said. “I feel the form.”
Zilia was born in Havana to Ramiro Sánchez, a Spanish émigré businessman, and Paula Dominguez, who was Cuban. She attended a local school until the age of 14 when, inspired by her father, an amateur painter, she swapped to drawing classes at the Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas Aplicadas in the city. Aged 16, in 1943, she enrolled at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, studying painting for five years.
After Fulgencio Batista’s seizure of power in a US-backed coup in 1952, Sánchez immersed herself in the artistic and literary circles of the resistance movement, producing sets for revolutionary theatre. Her earliest artworks featured richly coloured abstract line drawings, leading to a solo exhibition in 1953 at the Lyceum in Havana, as well as exhibitions with a group of artists called los Once (the Eleven), who shared her interest in gestural composition. International exhibitions followed in Madrid in 1957, Caracas in 1958, and at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959.
She was in Spain that year, when the Cuban revolution entered its final, victorious days, studying art restoration, a course that influenced her later interest in the formal structure of the painted canvas. Sánchez celebrated the end of the rightwing dictatorship, but her participation in the annual salon at the Palacio de Bellas Artes caused unease among communist officials, who were suspicious of non-figurative work, and her mother advised Sánchez against returning to Cuba permanently.
Instead, in 1960, Sánchez moved to New York, reconnecting with many of her avant-garde circle, now as émigrés. As well as making art, she worked at an art and antiques restoration shop, and designing book jackets.
By the time of her 1970 solo exhibition at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in San Juan, however, her style had fully evolved into what one critic called the “erotic topographies” that became her calling card. In 1971, “in search of something more like my home country”, she moved to Puerto Rico permanently, becoming involved as a graphic designer in the anti-colonialist and feminist literary journal Zona. Carga y Descarga.
She showed in Puerto Rico regularly throughout the intervening three decades, and in 1991 started teaching at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, San Juan, but her work remained virtually unknown internationally until 2013, when Artists Space in New York presented a survey exhibition.
That same year, Galerie Lelong, New York, began to represent the artist, staging a retrospective in 2014 of the paintings Sánchez had made in New York during the 60s and a second show in 2019 of large-scale marble, free-standing sculptures. These, while boasting the lumps and crevices Sánchez was now famous for, marked a departure for the artist in scale.
Despite the damage Hurricane Maria wrought on her studio and archives in 2018, in 2019 the artist had her first museum retrospective, at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, which travelled to Museo de Arte de Ponce, San Juan, and El Museo del Barrio, New York. In April the ICA Miami staged a second retrospective and her work was included in the 2024 Venice Biennale.
She is survived by her partner of nearly 60 years, Victoria Ruiz.
