Sarah Grilo (Buenos Aires, 1917 – Madrid, 2007) is one of the most singular and significant figures of postwar Latin American abstract art. Her work is built on the dialogue between painterly gesture and graphic sign: gestural strokes intertwined with fragments of text, letters, numbers, and symbols drawn from the urban environment and the mass media, shifting abstraction into the territory of the everyday. Her painting is, in this sense, a form of expanded writing: a particular system of signs that registers the sensory and visual effervescence of the cities she inhabited—Buenos Aires, Paris, New York, Madrid—constructing a visual record in permanent expansion.
Grilo's trajectory traverses very different stages without losing an essential coherence. Trained in the field of geometric and concrete abstraction—she participated in the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina (GAMA), convened by critic Aldo Pellegrini in 1952, alongside Tomás Maldonado, Alfredo Hlito, Lidy Prati, and Enio Iommi—her work underwent a radical shift following her arrival in New York in 1962, where she absorbed firsthand the explosion of the North American avant-garde. From that point on, her painting incorporated graffiti as a language, the city as a system of signs, and lyrical accumulation as a compositional structure. The appropriations of those New York years continued to define her work throughout the following decades, never abandoning a keen chromatic sensibility expressed through saturations, nuance, and a gestural quality of both intimate and urban resonance.
Her practice establishes dialogues with lyrical abstraction, abstract expressionism, and European informalism, while transcending them through an unmistakable voice of her own, in which emotion and rigor, the autobiographical and the collective, sign and gesture converge in paintings of singular intensity.
Sarah Grilo began her studies in Buenos Aires under the painter Vicente Puig, and later attended Pierre Francastel's seminar at La Sorbonne in Paris. In 1952 she participated in the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina (GAMA), convened by critic Aldo Pellegrini, whose exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam placed her on the map of international abstract art. She participated in the São Paulo Biennale (1953, 1961) and the Venice Biennale (1956). Awarded the J.S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, she moved to New York, where she developed one of the most decisive periods of her career. In 1970 she settled in southern Spain with her family, dividing her time between Paris and Madrid from 1980 onward, and establishing herself permanently in the Spanish capital in 1985, where she lived until her death in 2007. Among the most notable exhibitions of her work are presentations at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1964), the Art Institute of Chicago (1959), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1978), the Grand Palais (Paris, 1988), MoMA—where her work is held in the permanent collection and was included in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (2017) and Calligraphic Abstraction (2023–2024)—and the Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2023). In 2025 she presented Soluciones para pensar at Maisterravalbuena (Madrid). Her work is held in collections including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, the Nelson Rockefeller Collection, the Estrellita B. Brodsky Collection, the CIFO–Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, the Colección Banco Santander, and Spain's National Heritage, among others.