Sarah Grilo is a major figure of Latin American art from the second half of the twentieth century. She has worked in Buenos Aires, Paris, New York, and Madrid. Her work has been the subject of a number of solo shows in the United States, Latin America, and Europe: at the national fine arts museum in Buenos Aires, the fine arts museum in Caracas, the Institut de Arte Contemporáneo of Lima, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami, the American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the Nelson Rockefeller collection in New York, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Recently, in 2017, Grilo’s work was featured in the exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
As part of the Duke House Exhibition Series, The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to present the work of the Argentinian artists Sarah Grilo (1919–2007) and José Antonio Fernández-Muro (1920–2014) at The Institute of Fine Arts as part of the Duke House Exhibition Series. The exhibition seeks to map the influences and movements that inspired the artists' practices from the 1960s through the 1980s. The show features a selection of abstract paintings which create an intimate dialogue between Fernández-Muro’s mimicry of urban and industrial patterns and Grilo’s morphological style. In addition to these paintings, the exhibition also includes an array of exhibition catalogues, publications, documentary photographs, and other rare archival materials. Grilo/Fernández-Muro: 1962–1984 was organized by Andrea Carolina Zambrano, Damasia Lacroze, Emireth Herrera, and Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar, and was made possible through the support of The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.; and the Estate of Sarah Grilo and José Antonio Fernández-Muro. Funded by ISLAA.
José Antonio Fernández-Muro (1920–2014) was born in Spain and emigrated to Argentina in 1938. Fernández-Muro's early work was geometric, often incorporating texture and using a stencil to cover his canvases in dots. When he moved to New York in 1962, he began to produce foil impressions of manhole covers and sidewalks that he obtained from the streets of New York at night, which he then adhered to his paintings. This series was contemporaneous with the Pop art movement in the United States. After living in the US for several years, Fernández-Muro returned to Europe in 1970 and eventually settled in Madrid.