Sonja Sekula

Sonja Sekula was born in Switzerland in 1918 and moved to New York City in 1936, becoming linked with the abstract expressionist movement in the New York art world during the 1940s and early 1950s. 

She studied art in New York at Sarah Lawrence College and the Art Students League where she befriended such luminaries as choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and artists such as Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock – the latter with whom she exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery in New York. Her paintings of the 1940’s and 1950’s have a vibrancy and elegance all their own. They are distinguished by calligraphic marking and collages, the latter of which she produced toward the end of her career. She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others.

Sekula was open about her homosexuality and her struggles with mental illness, and made frequent references to it in her writings and journals. 

Her work is also held in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Walker Art Center.