Emilio Sanchez
1921–1999

Emilio Sanchez (1921–1999) was an American artist known for his architectural paintings and graphic lithographs. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York NY), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana (Havana, Cuba), Museo de Arte de Ponce (Ponce, Puerto Rico), Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (Bogotá, Colombia), La Tertulia Museum (Cali, Colombia), and the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, Australia).

A representational artist with a modernist and at times abstract approach, Sanchez emphasized "pattern, color and strong lighting contrasts". By 1970 architectural themes, from detailed stained glass windows to abstracted storefronts or city skylines, dominated his oeuvre. Carol Damian of the Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL) described his work as studies in "horizontals and verticals, bold stripes of color, and the ever-present shadows, especially diagonal shadows that he so favored, with darks and lights in repetition." For her, Sanchez's work was "not a picture of something, but the application of pigment onto a flat surface to become a singular object to its own definition."