The Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez has died, Galerie Lelong & Co announced on Thursday. Her sensuous stretched canvases provided a feminist counterpoint to the male-dominated Minimalist movement.
Born in Havana in 1926, Sánchez studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro before leaving Cuba in a self-imposed political exile after Fidel Castro came to power. She later studied printmaking at the Pratt Institute in New York then conservation at the Prado in Madrid and had many occupations including set design, graphic design and illustration alongside her art career.
Though already well-known in Cuba, Sánchez started gaining international recognition in the 2010s, showing works at Artists Space in New York, the Venice Biennale, ICA Miami, Centre Pompidou, among others.
Writing in ArtReview Summer 2013, David Everitt Howe described her works as ‘redolently minimalist yet simultaneously contrary to it… They offer a refreshing, feminist retort to standard art historical narratives’.
