Zilia Sánchez, Painter Who Found Fame Late in Life, Dies at 98

Sometime in the 1950s, Zilia Sánchez, a Cuban-born painter, was crying on a Havana rooftop, mourning the recent death of her father, when she caught a sight that would shape her career of more than seven decades: her father’s bedsheet, drying on a line, draped by the breeze over a nearby pipe and beams.

“I felt like the sheet I had seen blowing in the wind was like his skin, and the wooden construction beneath it resembled a skeleton,” she said in a 2016 interview with Ocula, an art magazine. “I had to eternalize it because of this. It was a very emotional moment and still is an emotional memory. It felt like I saw my father’s soul leaving his body.”

For Ms. Sánchez, who died on Dec. 18 in San Juan, P.R., at 98, the image ultimately inspired her signature creations: minimalist paintings rendered in muted colors applied to canvas skins stretched over elaborate wooden armatures. The results were distinctive three-dimensional works that suggested images of waves, the moon and often the female anatomy, blurring the lines between painting and sculpture.

Still, recognition was a long time coming. Ms. Sánchez was in her 80s when she began to find serious acclaim outside the Caribbean. Her first solo show in New York was a small survey of her work at Artists Space in Lower Manhattan in 2013.

In reviewing that show, the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote: “There is nothing in New York galleries like this work, which has a boldness and strangeness entirely its own. Why we had to wait so long to have a survey is a mystery. Why wasn’t this artist included in the Venice Biennale?” (She eventually was: Her work was shown at the Biennale in 2017 and 2024.)

One reason for the long delay, critics have noted, was that Ms. Sánchez had spent more than a half-century working in Puerto Rico, far from the art centers of Europe and the United States. It was an era when Latina and lesbian artists — she was both — were largely confined to the shadows.