Zilia Sánchez Dominguez (born 1926) is a Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist from Havana. She started her career as a set designer and an abstract painter for theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban revolution of 1953-59. Sanchez blurs the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes. Her works are minimal in color, and have erotic overtones.

History

Sánchez was born in Havana, Cuba. Her mother was Cuban and her father Spanish. In 1943 Sánchez studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes "San Alejandro" in Havana and later had her first solo exhibition in 1953. Following Fidel Castro's rise to power, Sanchez moved to New York where she studied printmaking at Pratt Institute. She works in a pre-war wooden studio in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, where much of her artwork was destroyed by water damage in 2018 during Hurricane Maria. Her work was included in the influential exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-85 at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018. She is a feminist pioneer in contemporary art, and in 2020 her work was featured in the scholarly researched and historic group show My Body My Rules, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami - Sánchez's work Untitled, from the series Topología Erótica (Erotic Topology) from 1970 is included in the museum's Caribbean Cultural Institute collection. Her Amazonas series features female warriors highlighting the female form and her work has been described as having "sensual contours". Sánchez's art style changed within the beginning years of her creating art. Early into her career she was focused on creating pieces that focused on the informal practices of abstract expressionism and visual language. By the mid-1960's she had started working on her sensual signature stretched canvas works. Her artwork has been described as "overlooked" and "rarely seen outside of Puerto Rico." In 2019, the Phillips Collection exhibited her first museum retrospective, covering her 70-year career, and her work was included in the group show The Gift of Art, at Pérez Art Museum Miami. The exhibition highlighted important artworks within PAMM's permanent collection on Latinx and Latin American artists. Among the artists featured in the exhibition were José Bedia (Cuba), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), Roberto Matta (Chile), Oscar Murillo (Colombia), Amelia Peláez (Cuba), Wifredo Lam (Cuba), Tunga (Brazil), and Carmen Herrera (Cuba). Sánchez's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Exhibitions