One night when Zilia Sánchez was a young woman in 1950s Cuba, she was sitting out on the roof of her parents’ house in Havana. There her mother had constructed a washing line, and Sánchez recalled seeing the drying bedsheets blow against a length of wood that protruded from the wall, the white material taking the form of the structure beneath. The memory of this accidental sculpture became an enduring influence on the artist’s paintings.
From the 60s onwards, mostly working out of the limelight, Sánchez, who has died aged 98, pulled and pushed the canvas beyond the frame, shaping the material around armatures into points and mounds.
