Zilia Sánchez Domínguez
Zilia Sánchez Dominguez is a Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist born in Havana in 1926. She started her career as a set designer and an abstract painter for radical 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 currently 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. 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 abstact 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.