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Lot Essay
Born in Havana but long resident abroad, in New York through the 1960s and in Puerto Rico after 1971, Sánchez numbers among an untold generation of artists only lately brought to light within the history of contemporary Cuban art. Well abreast of postwar abstraction, in ways similar to compatriots Carmen Herrera and Loló Soldevilla as well as to Lucio Fontana and Charles Hinman, Sánchez’s early practice is distinguished by a graphic, painterly architectonics, a direction reinforced during her first trip to Madrid in 1957. Influenced in part by Art Informel, her abstraction acquired an increasingly spatial and textured materiality that, in the ensuing decades, evolved toward Minimalist monochrome and modularity. A beloved teacher at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de San Juan beginning in the 1970s, Sánchez worked largely under the radar as she developed the shaped, and sometimes “tattooed” paintings and serial structures christened “erotic topologies” by Severo Sarduy, the Cuban writer and her longtime friend. An acclaimed exhibition at Artist’s Space in 2013 marked her triumphant return to the New York scene, and her remarkable, late-career ascendance was crowned by the major retrospective, Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla, organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. in 2019, and by her inclusion at the Venice Biennial in 2017 and 2024.
“I was always searching for the invisible and the unknown,” Sánchez once reflected. “It is the feeling that matters.” That heightened sensibility yielded a number of formative encounters (“encuentros”) across her career as well as the broader philosophy of “encuentrismo,” which gave its name to the present work as well as to the much later film, encuentrismo—ofrenda o retorno (2000), in which she continuously casts a painting (Soy Isla; Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection) into the water. Sánchez has attributed the genesis of her practice (and, suggestively, of “encuentrismo”) to a singular experience on the rooftop of her family home on the day of her father’s death in 1955. “The day he died felt like I had died,” she recalled. “I remember I saw his bedsheet. . . . The sheet was drying, and since it was windy, it was hitting against a wooden space divider, and this image of the blowing bedsheet against wood got stuck in my mind. I think that such moments of internalizing the outside world, especially when you are young, are of crucial importance, and you never forget them” (in Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2019, pp. 19-20).
The present Encuentrismo may well be one of the first paintings in which Sánchez explicitly articulated the experiential and providential space of painting as a place of encounter: between line and plane, past and present, body and memory. “I began with flatness and continued with another dimension that resembles motion; it was a restless exploration, a quest for change,” she explained. “The interval between one thing and the other is what I find interesting, that space most difficult to bring into focus, a kind of boundary. . . . I see the canvas as a skin; like a tattoo, it contains remembrances of the past” (in A. Barral, “Interview: Zilia Sánchez,” Art Nexus 104, March-May 2017, pp. 48-50). Here, the blocky, quasi-geometric passages of dark purple and pale beige interact with a network of linear (tattooed) forms that echo and clarify the shapes in the background. Encuentrismo relates both to her earlier gestural abstraction, seen for example in Azul Azul (1956), and to the complex linearity of works such as Composición en blanco (1959), which she showed at the V São Paulo Biennial in 1959. In its elongated horizontal format, Encuentrismo suggests the unfurling of a multidimensional encounter across time and space, its composition an expression of the intangible, liminal spaces between ourselves and the world around us.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“I was always searching for the invisible and the unknown,” Sánchez once reflected. “It is the feeling that matters.” That heightened sensibility yielded a number of formative encounters (“encuentros”) across her career as well as the broader philosophy of “encuentrismo,” which gave its name to the present work as well as to the much later film, encuentrismo—ofrenda o retorno (2000), in which she continuously casts a painting (Soy Isla; Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection) into the water. Sánchez has attributed the genesis of her practice (and, suggestively, of “encuentrismo”) to a singular experience on the rooftop of her family home on the day of her father’s death in 1955. “The day he died felt like I had died,” she recalled. “I remember I saw his bedsheet. . . . The sheet was drying, and since it was windy, it was hitting against a wooden space divider, and this image of the blowing bedsheet against wood got stuck in my mind. I think that such moments of internalizing the outside world, especially when you are young, are of crucial importance, and you never forget them” (in Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2019, pp. 19-20).
The present Encuentrismo may well be one of the first paintings in which Sánchez explicitly articulated the experiential and providential space of painting as a place of encounter: between line and plane, past and present, body and memory. “I began with flatness and continued with another dimension that resembles motion; it was a restless exploration, a quest for change,” she explained. “The interval between one thing and the other is what I find interesting, that space most difficult to bring into focus, a kind of boundary. . . . I see the canvas as a skin; like a tattoo, it contains remembrances of the past” (in A. Barral, “Interview: Zilia Sánchez,” Art Nexus 104, March-May 2017, pp. 48-50). Here, the blocky, quasi-geometric passages of dark purple and pale beige interact with a network of linear (tattooed) forms that echo and clarify the shapes in the background. Encuentrismo relates both to her earlier gestural abstraction, seen for example in Azul Azul (1956), and to the complex linearity of works such as Composición en blanco (1959), which she showed at the V São Paulo Biennial in 1959. In its elongated horizontal format, Encuentrismo suggests the unfurling of a multidimensional encounter across time and space, its composition an expression of the intangible, liminal spaces between ourselves and the world around us.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park