Layers of colour, numbers and letters overlap, evoking an old billboard that‘s seen many coats of paste. Only individual words and sentence fragments are recognisable: "Not enough time" – "Only"" – "more than"" – or, top left: "America has changed".
That was artist Sarah Grilo’s choice of title for this picture: ""America has changed"".In her home country of Argentina, she’d made a name for herself as a pioneer of abstract painting and become known internationally as a result. In the early 1960s, a scholarship took her to New York, where she remained for almost a decade. The city inspired her enormously:
Sarah Grilo: “Here I find everything I need for my painting. Things are constantly happening that can be incorporated as abstractions; all you have to do is to look out the window or walk down the street.”
In New York, Sarah Grilo started painting with an enthusiasm she’d never felt before. And her painting changed. Instead of abstract figures, writing now started to occupy an ever greater place in her work. The multifaceted impressions of a metropolis literally inscribed themselves into her paintings. As she roamed the city, posters, graffiti, advertising slogans and newspaper headlines caught her eye, and she condensed them, compressed them into various typographies and scribbles on canvas. And created not just a style of painting, but also a form of poetry. As in a poem, the fragments can come together in your consciousness to form a text and a sound.
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Sarah Grilo
Layers of colour, numbers and letters overlap, evoking an old billboard that‘s seen many coats of paste. Only individual words and sentence fragments are recognisable: "Not enough time" – "Only"" – "more than"" – or, top left: "America has changed".
That was artist Sarah Grilo’s choice of title for this picture: ""America has changed"".In her home country of Argentina, she’d made a name for herself as a pioneer of abstract painting and become known internationally as a result. In the early 1960s, a scholarship took her to New York, where she remained for almost a decade. The city inspired her enormously:
Sarah Grilo: “Here I find everything I need for my painting. Things are constantly happening that can be incorporated as abstractions; all you have to do is to look out the window or walk down the street.”
In New York, Sarah Grilo started painting with an enthusiasm she’d never felt before. And her painting changed. Instead of abstract figures, writing now started to occupy an ever greater place in her work. The multifaceted impressions of a metropolis literally inscribed themselves into her paintings. As she roamed the city, posters, graffiti, advertising slogans and newspaper headlines caught her eye, and she condensed them, compressed them into various typographies and scribbles on canvas. And created not just a style of painting, but also a form of poetry. As in a poem, the fragments can come together in your consciousness to form a text and a sound.
Further links on the topic
Further artworks from this exhibition
Sarah Grilo
America Has Changed, 1967
Soledad Sevilla
Los días con Pessoa, 2021
Dora García
Frase de oro (Revolución, cumple tu promesa), 2022
Carmen Láffon
La sal. Salinas de Bonanza, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, 2017-2019
Erlea Maneros Zabala
Exercises on Abstraction. Series VI, 2019