Zilia Sánchez’s Sinuous, Overtly Sensual Forms

at Galerie Lelong & Co (ended) and El Museo Del Barrio, NYC (through March 22)
Reviewed by Pheobe Hoban

Cuban-born Zilia Sánchez, 93, has always been ahead of the curve, even if she has remained for the most part unknown outside her adopted country, Puerto Rico. Her elegant, shaped canvases, many of them takeoffs on the female form, hold their own with the best of Minimalism, as does the work of that other long-forgotten and now much-acclaimed Cuban-born artist, Carmen Herrera. But unlike Herrera’s hard-edged geometric Minimalism, Sánchez creates overtly sensual sculptural paintings, with undulating curves and rounded protuberances that resemble breasts and genitalia, while simultaneously evoking spare, pneumatic topographies.

Sánchez’s sinuous use of curvilinear forms derives from an epiphany she had as a young woman, when she saw a sheet from her father’s deathbed, washed and hung out to dry, billowing in the wind. She also strongly identifies herself as a queer artist, and the suggestive hollows, mounds and slits in her work are undeniably intimate.

Not surprisingly, her second solo show at Galerie Lelong & Co., which ran from November 21, 2019 through January 17, 2020, concurrently with a traveling retrospective now at El Museo Del Barrio that opened on November 21 and runs through March 22, was entitled simply Eros. It includes a dozen or so pieces, including her first-ever marble sculpture.