Described as a “Taoist philosopher of lyrical abstractionism,” Susana Sierra was a Mexican feminist artist specializing in action painting and romantic abstraction. She would mix oils and acrylics in primary and pastel color tones, incorporating several faint lines and drips onto the canvas, bringing a mastery of color and space and unrestrained energy to her paintings. Occasionally producing two paintings a month, the artist preferred sunlight to work briskly and dry her paintings. Sierra visualized her art as a bridge between her subconscious and reality: “My painting is born from the successive moments in which the mind is not judging, not trying to make a reading of technique or style but to feel how it arises from something very deep in me…I am always making accidents, it is never external, it arises from the process of making the work.”
Sierra was a disciple of Swiss-born figurative artist Roger von Gunten in the early 1960s. After studying art history in Italy and France, and then philosophy and pre-Hispanic art, she graduated in 1976 from La Esmeralda in Mexico City. Sierra received two acquisition awards at the Annual Painting Salon in the Palace of Fine Arts and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts. Her works have been exhibited throughout Mexico since 1974, specifically at the Manuel Felguérez Museum of Abstract Art and the José Luis Cuevas Museum, both in Mexico City, and the Rubén Herrera Museum in Saltillo. Public collections worldwide include the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
