(RE)DISCOVERING SARAH GRILO AT MAISTERRAVALBUENA
Madrid-based Maisterravalbuena proposes a vindication of the work of Sarah Grilo (Buenos Aires, Argentina,1917 - Madrid, Spain, 2007) through Soluciones para pensar, the second exhibition on this artist at the gallery. With a didactic and rediscovery vocation, the exhibition gathers a selection of paintings in different formats made between the 1960s and 1990s, many of them unpublished to the public. This work of selection and direct work of the gallery with the archive and the legacy of the Argentinean artist becomes fundamental in the structuring of the objective of creating opportunities for a greater knowledge of Grilo's work.
In this way, the proposed tour traces a practically testimonial line of the artistic and social influences that the artist experienced in first person, not only as a witness, in one of the most relevant periods of the New York in which she lived in the sixties and seventies. An attentive look at her canvases reveals a diatribe between the strictest academicism and permeability to new trends that emerge and rubs, but that, against a choice, assimilates them to coexist in the creation of a unique and own language.
The strength of the stroke in many of the works exhibited appears controlled, perhaps the result of that drive more technical than impetus, but recognizes the influence of a latent expressionism that forms part of her aesthetic. The balance of the grids and segmentation originates a certain verticality and formal straightness that also underlies as a substrate of an early approach to geometric abstractions and serves as a controlled space for the population of signs and elements of the big city.
The typographies, the lights and the almost unconscious acceptance of the impact of the advertising and capitalist projection to her credit endow a tangential pop possibility in the reading of her canvases. All the disorder of Grilo’s own vital inertia flows with a certain order in the urban layouts, straight, but full of objects and experiences that abound in an anonymous individualism. He does not leave aside, nor does he pretend to, any impulse of the new aesthetics or the presence of the media and its sociology, but he sifts them and processes them under a personal mark that will lead her to work in a constant semiotics of the elements and the information.
All this will continue to be present throughout her production, some of it condemned to ostracism until there are occasions such as the present one, and which denotes a valid technical continuity in which the chromatic will also vary according to the artist’s life trajectories. However, if we consider her work as a diary or notebook, it is evident the use of more vivid colors at a time when the Mediterranean environments of her Barcelona or Marbella are present to the detriment of the urban pigment, more muted perhaps, but never forgetting the artist's trajectory or denying what she has lived, consolidating a continuous learning that we are now allowed to enjoy in a more complete way.
Sarah Grilo: Soluciones para pensar can be seen until May 3 at Maisterravalbuena, Hospital, 8, Madrid (Spain).
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