“Untitled” (America) | Art & Artists

With its titular reference to the Greek god of love and desire as well as its painted curving lines, muted palette, and protruding forms, Zilia Sánchez’s Eros invites an intimate experience with the canvas. Rejecting the rigid formalism of modernist abstraction, Sanchez took a personal and feminist approach to her work by merging the clean lines of hard-edge painting with an evocation of the body and human connection. She inscribed the edges of this canvas with the words "Soy Isla" [I Am an Island], a phrase she sometimes used as an assertion of her artistic independence as well as a reference to her Cuban heritage and longtime home of Puerto Rico.