Zilia Sánchez, Painter Who Found Fame Late in Life, Dies at 98

Sometime in the 1950s, Zilia Sánchez, a Cuban-born painter, was crying on a Havana rooftop, mourning the recent death of her father, when she caught a sight that would shape her career of more than seven decades: her father’s bedsheet, drying on a line, draped by the breeze over a nearby pipe and beams.

“I felt like the sheet I had seen blowing in the wind was like his skin, and the wooden construction beneath it resembled a skeleton,” she said in a 2016 interview with Ocula, an art magazine. “I had to eternalize it because of this. It was a very emotional moment and still is an emotional memory. It felt like I saw my father’s soul leaving his body.”

For Ms. Sánchez, who died on Dec. 18 in San Juan, P.R., at 98, the image ultimately inspired her signature creations: minimalist paintings rendered in muted colors applied to canvas skins stretched over elaborate wooden armatures. The results were distinctive three-dimensional works that suggested images of waves, the moon and often the female anatomy, blurring the lines between painting and sculpture.

Still, recognition was a long time coming. Ms. Sánchez was in her 80s when she began to find serious acclaim outside the Caribbean. Her first solo show in New York was a small survey of her work at Artists Space in Lower Manhattan in 2013.

In reviewing that show, the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote: “There is nothing in New York galleries like this work, which has a boldness and strangeness entirely its own. Why we had to wait so long to have a survey is a mystery. Why wasn’t this artist included in the Venice Biennale?” (She eventually was: Her work was shown at the Biennale in 2017 and 2024.)

One reason for the long delay, critics have noted, was that Ms. Sánchez had spent more than a half-century working in Puerto Rico, far from the art centers of Europe and the United States. It was an era when Latina and lesbian artists — she was both — were largely confined to the shadows.

But Ms. Sánchez’s female focus was also a major source of her work’s power: She explored the relationship between the exterior physical form of women and the interior consciousness in works known as “topologías eróticas” (“erotic topologies”) — stylized, if anatomically unambiguous, evocations of women’s bodies.

Such imagery “blatantly evokes the female body — nipples, lips (vaginal or otherwise) and so on — but it is not representational,” Barry Schwabsky wrote in Artforum magazine in 2014 in reviewing an exhibition of her work at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York. “That it can be at once so in-your-face and so indirect is probably its greatest strength.”

The gallery, which represented Ms. Sánchez’s work, announced her death but did not say where she died.

The critic Ian Bourland, writing in Frieze magazine, glimpsed influences as varied as Picasso, the Cuban modernists of the 1940s and ’50s, and the kinetic sculptures of the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego. Her paintings, he wrote in a review of her first museum retrospective in the United States, a 2019 show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, “radiate with surface tension on the verge of disruption, as in a figure slowly emerging from a still pond.”

Ms. Sánchez received further exposure when the exhibition — titled “Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island),” and composed of dozens of artworks dating to the 1950s — was mounted at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan in 2020. Her topologies are “controlled, with a cool palette of mostly black, white and gray, yet so animated, they often seem as if they’re trying to come alive,” Jillian Steinhauer wrote in a 2020 review in The Times.

The kinetic qualities of the works were top of mind for the artist herself. “I began with flatness and continued with another dimension that resembles motion,” Ms. Sánchez told ArtNexus magazine in 2017. “It was a restless exploration, a quest for change.”

Her work often explored strong female historical and literary figures, including Joan of Arc and Antigone, the star-crossed heroine of Greek tragedy.

“The Amazons,” from 1968, featured nipple-like protrusions but also moundlike nubs, a reference to the legend that these warrior women of Greek mythology sacrificed their right breasts to aid their effectiveness as archers. They “had to go through a lot of suffering,” Ms. Sánchez later said, “yet they overpowered the tragic and became heroines.”

Zilia Sánchez Dominguez was born on July 12, 1926, in Havana. She got an early introduction to art from her father, an amateur painter, and in her teens was mentored by the artist Victor Manuel García, a neighbor.

She eventually enrolled at Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, a prestigious fine arts school in Havana. After graduating in 1947, she began exhibiting her abstract work in the early 1950s. Later that decade, she represented her country at biennial exhibitions in Mexico and Brazil.

By then, revolutionary fervor was roiling Cuba, and Ms. Sánchez began designing sets for guerrilla theater troupes. She was studying painting restoration at the Prado Museum in Madrid when Fidel Castro’s forces toppled the government of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

“I remember how my mother called me and said, ‘Don’t come back now, we have revolution!’” she told Ocula.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Sánchez moved to New York City, where she studied printmaking at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and mingled with Cuban émigré intellectuals while making paintings that radiated the influence of the emerging school of Minimalism.

Roughly a decade later, Ms. Sanchez moved to San Juan, where she created photomontages and designs for the influential literary journal Zona de Carga y Descarga. She later taught at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, an art college in the city.

She is survived by her partner of nearly six decades, Victoria Ruiz.

Well into her 90s, Ms. Sánchez continued to work daily in her San Juan studio, which had views of the sun-dappled ocean. The studio was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017 but rebuilt after Klaus Biesenbach, then the director of MoMA PS1 in New York, helped rally support for its reconstruction.

Despite the taut precision of her work, Ms. Sánchez’s approach remained intuitive and, at times, spontaneous.

“Colors have to call me,” she was quoted as saying in a 2019 profile in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. “It’s why I’ve never used red. Sometimes I listen to the call and I grab my brush and start painting over works that are already done.”