Barcelona, 1945

Dominica Sanchez has a long trajectory of exhibitions, mainly in Paris and the United States.

The drawings, generally on large format paper sometimes stained with pigments, are personal observations of a natural world, marked by a dialogue between the fragile and ephemeral and the musculature of volume. The play of light curves, traced with pencil, and the dense and opaque geometries that mark her drawings creates a balanced space that Maria Lluïsa Borràs described as an “interior landscape, the only genre that has contributed to painting in the last century: a painting that describes emotions, sensations, the painter’s mood without going into reality and, far from reproducing what the eyes see, it is based exclusively on pictorial elements, with form, line, structure, and color”.

Dominica Sanchez has spent many years perfecting this pictorial language, whose simplicity belies the depth of emotions that the drawings carry, and it is important to emphasize that they are not sketches for the sculptures, but works that are properly independent, made with an individualized language that they share with the sculptures. But it is drawing that eventually led her to discover the possibilities of the third dimension.

Starting with cardboard forms that she cuts and folds until she is satisfied with the result, Sánchez then transfers them to thin iron plates that she manipulates with folds, curves and welds with surprising results that recall the work of Oteiza, Nicholson or González. Heirs to a long tradition of constructivist sculpture that claims a position against carving and modeling, Dominica Sanchez’s sculptures are of an austere and elegant abstraction that, despite their intimate scale, evoke a great monumentality.