Bio
Works on paper
Sculpture

Images open in new window

Dominica Sánchez

Born in Barcelona in 1945, Dominica Sánchez has a long history of exhibitions, especially in Paris and the United States, although she has exhibited relatively seldom in her own country.

The drawings, generally on large format paper, sometimes stained with pigments, are personal observations of a natural world, defined by a dialogue between the fragile and ephemeral and the muscularity of volume. The play between the delicate curves, rendered in pencil and the dense and opaque geomtries that mark her drawings create a balanced space that Maria Lluïsa Borràs described as "an interior landscape, the only genre that painting has given us in the last century: a type of painting that describes emotions, sensations, the mood of the artist without referring to reality and that, far from reproducing that which the eyes see, is based exclusively in pictorial elements, with the form and the line, the structure and the colour."

Dominica Sánchez has spent years perfecting a pictorial language whose simplicity belies the depth of the emotions inherent in the drawings, and it is important to note that they are not preliminary works for the scultpures, but independent pieces, created with an individualized language that is shared with the sculptures. Yet it is the drawings that eventually led her to discover the possiblities of working in the third dimension.

Starting with cardboard shapes that she cuts and folds until a satisfactory form emerges, Sánchez then turns to thin sheets of steel which she manipulates with pleats or curves, and soldering the work to achieve surprising results that recall the work of Oteiza, Nicholson or González. Heirs to a long tradition of constructivist sculpture defined by its position against traditional modelling or carving, the scultpures of Dominica Sánchez are of an elegant and austere abstraction that, despite their intimate scale, evoke a great sense of monumentality.