SONJA SEKULA

Lucerne, Switzerland, 1918 — Zurich, Switzerland, 1963

Sonja Sekula's practice was shaped as much by displacement and interiority as by formal innovation. Born in Lucerne in 1918 to a Swiss mother and Hungarian father, her early exposure to European cultural networks informed a sensibility attuned to both literary and visual experimentation. Following Sekula family's relocation to New York in 1936, she entered the intellectual environment of Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied painting, poetry, and criticism before enrolling at the Art Students League in 1941, where she encountered George Grosz and quickly moved into André Breton's Surrealist circle. As she noted in a 1945 interview: "It is the women's era too — they are at last coming forward painting pictures of sensitivity, emotion and worth."

Sekula’s immersion in New York's avant-garde catalyzed a remarkable period of production. Biomorphic forms, flattened geometries, and tactile surfaces — increasingly inflected by travels to New Mexico and Mexico and a sustained engagement with Native American visual culture — coalesce into compositions that oscillate between abstraction and symbolic figuration, bridging Surrealism and the emerging tendencies of Abstract Expressionism. Her painting Composition (1942) was included in Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women (1943) alongside Carrington, Kahlo, and Sterne; she appeared again in Guggenheim's follow-up show, The Women (1945); and in 1946 Guggenheim gave her the first solo exhibition of her career at Art of This Century — a show whose warm critical reception prompted Stuart Preston, reviewing her subsequent 1951 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, to call her "the abstract Paganini." Attente d’Ecume (1944) was included in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025).

Openly lesbian and living with schizophrenia, Sekul articulated a complex subjectivity that recent scholarship has begun to situate within queer modernist discourse. Severe breakdowns from the early 1950s onward led to her permanent return to Switzerland in 1955, where she continued working in increasing isolation until her death in Zurich in 1963. The recovery of her work by institutions has accelerated meaningfully: MoMA acquired Town of the Poor (1951) in 2018 and a second work in 2022; Action, Gesture, Paint at the Whitechapel Gallery (2023) included her work; and Peter Blum Gallery mounted a major survey that year. Unruly Lines: The Art of Sonja Sekula is on view at the Grinnell College Museum of Art (2026) and then will travel to The Gund at Kenyon College in the second half of 2026.

Work by Sonja Sekula is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Sekula's contributions in the record of art history.