Raquel Sanchez is a multi-disciplinary artist. She has attracted and interested art collectors worldwide. Her paintings are uniquely identifiable, surprisingly kinetic and reflective of how artists perceive light. Much of her paintings and poetry is in this space and many of her works are considered ambient and spiritual. Sanchez has made and designed murals, lighting fixtures, fans and furniture. She enjoys redesigning and up cycling otherwise unusable furniture and surfaces to make them invaluable.
Sanchez's paintings are featured at Rosenbach Contemporary Gallery on 10 King David street in Jerusalem and is sold here and on Etsy.
Raquel Sanchez was born in Paris, France in the early 1960’s to an American artist mother, Ellen Lapidus Stern and Venezuelan Laureate writer father. She has two sisters. The 1960’s was a unique period for affluent artists and their families. In her early years she would call many places home, yet one constant was the variety of artists flowing through her environs and travels. The countless schools of her youth were mainly science and art oriented. She grew up against the backdrop of languages and cultures, surrounded by writers and artists in places ranging from New York to Ibiza, Morocco to Venezuela, and the list goes on. While in elementary school in Essaouira, Morocco, Jimi Hendrix would accompany her and together they colored with Crayola crayons. While living in Ibiza, her classmates were children of renowned movie actors and stars. Raquel was influenced by visiting artists such as the Irish singer and political activist Bob Geldof.
She graduated from Edward R. Murrow High School in New York, renowned for its fine art education. Between classes and after school, she drew and painted in the school yard with Jean-Michel Basquiat. They would speak comfortably in French and Spanish as Sanchez taught and practiced one-line drawings with Basquiat. They considered one another “besties” as he attempted to recruit her to do graffiti in Brooklyn. Later on Basquiat would try to convince Raquel to go to New York City to paint with him in his East Village groups. Rather than joining, she worked at Interview Magazine, at fashion hubs for the elite, and art galleries in Greenwich village where occasional visits with Keith Haring became part of her artistic transcript from which she draws.
While at Brooklyn College Raquel spent time with the American Laureate poet Allen Ginsberg and corralled around his entourage of poets more freely than most, due to Ginsberg’s friendship with her father, Juan Sanchez Pelaez, the renowned Venezuelan Poet. He founded a Venezuelan form of writing surrealism which is studied in universities to this day. Connected to the poets of the Beat generation, yet more internationally acclaimed, he became famous for this form while studying at the University of Chile with the Mandragora group.
Raquel Sanchez is a member of the International Artist's Union, the Israel Association of Writers in English and the National Association of Social Workers where she has created art centered and GED programs for youth and organized alternative education programs for youth with art, sculpture and poetry. She is a published poet, critiqued by the Canadian-American poet laureate Mark Strand. Strand occasionally would speak with her about translations and through his friendship with her father, shared his thoughts with her and with Sanchez Pelaez as they critiqued her poetry. Her Tel Aviv experience in the early 1990’s made her lifelong friends with elder talents who continue to influence her writing.
In the early 1990’s, after receiving her Master’s Degree from Yeshiva University, Sanchez founded The Rose Institute (which later became Crossroads) an organization working with at-risk English-speaking youth in Jerusalem. Following the successful establishment and growth of the organization, Sanchez returned to New York in 2001 where she became a PhD student at New York University. Raquel remained active as a writer with Slam groups and performed as a poet in a multitude of East Village, West Village and Uptown venues. In 2003, while still living in New York, Raquel rediscovered painting. Her paintings in New York were initially an attempt at regaining inspiration following the passing of her father and re-polishing skills in the plastic arts. A dear friend Sheldon Ostro who was a Holocaust painter brought her to Pearl Paint, her old stomping ground, where they spent five hours researching mediums for new beginnings. She regained skills while crushing pastels in mortar and pestles and worked on thick high grade paper. Later in Jerusalem she expanded this process for her exhibit: www.rosenbach.co.il/exhibit/88-new-world-order-a-different-perspective
Sanchez returned to Israel in 2013 following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy to be closer to family. In Jerusalem, she fully devoted herself to painting and blossomed. Following several exhibitions, in 2016 she began exhibiting at Rosenbach Contemporary after being introduced to the gallery by her mother. The Rosenbach Contemporary is a Jerusalem art gallery dedicated to promoting contemporary Israeli artists paintings. Sanchez's personal voice is an emotional process of observation, search, and interpretation of the surrealistic meaning of existence itself. Her artistic language is unique, one which has its foundation in the masters of Impressionism and Post Impressionism, instilled with technique of the action painters, mysticism of the surrealists with the language of the Modern and Contemporary artists of her youth. Yet a certain metaphoric voice in her work would speak; this voice seemed to be curiously unconnected to the past. In the latter part of 2022 Sanchez translated 18 of her father’s poems from Spanish to English https://a.co/d/1gmZgdt for a University group in Venezuela honoring the 100th year of her patriarchal lineage. This prompted an acknowledgement of her inheritance as a surrealist artist which related to the written world of her father's. This most recent exhibit is a perspective of acknowledgement connecting the different voices of Sanchez's archetypal expression: www.rosenbach.co.il/exhibit/101-raquel-sanchez-pst-renovation
The Light from Darkness series is an exhibit about the beginning of time and the attributes connected to humanity created during this beginning.
https://rosenbach.co.il/exhibit/100-raquel-sanchez-light-from-darkness
