[5] The grandson of sugar entrepreneur Bernabé Sánchez Adan and a member of one of Cuba's oldest and wealthiest families, Sanchez's early life was one of privilege.
[7] After his parents divorced, his mother married Peruvian artist Felipe Cossío del Pomar in 1938 and moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
[14] His 1956 solo show at El Lyceum (Havana, Cuba) led to his association with Galeria Cubana de Pintura y Escultura and group exhibitions in Venezuela and Columbia.
[17] At this time solo exhibitions of his work were held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Madrid, Spain, as well as in Houston, New Orleans, and New York.
[12] During the 1970s, frequent trips to the Mediterranean inspired Sanchez to adopt a more geometric and minimalist approach in his Moroccan paintings or Boston City Hall drawings.
[20] Since his death, solo exhibitions of Sanchez's work were noted at the Bronx Museum in 2001;[21] at Boston City Hall in 2009;[22] and at Syracuse University Art Galleries in 2011.
[10] During his career, his critical supporters included American art collector Barbara Duncan and A Hyatt Mayor, print curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
[25] Although his flat, sometimes abstract, geometric style was not unlike his Brazilian contemporaries Alfredo Volpi and Livio Abramo, his paintings evoked a sense of place that, for art historian Rafael DíazCasas, reflected a "feeling of displacement" and "idea of an absent household".
[25] Aesthetically versatile, Sanchez's "modernist investigations"[11] are also linked to the Pop art imagery of Andy Warhol or Jasper Johns,[32] or can be categorized as Camp (style).
"[13] In 2021, on the centennial anniversary of Sanchez's birth, the United States Postal Service released a series of postage stamps featuring four of his works: Los Toldos (1973), Ty’s Place (1976), En el Souk (1972) and Untitled (Ventanita entreabierta) (1981).
[9] From 2005 to 2012, the Foundation distributed over 4,000 of the artist's 7,000 prints or paintings to 72 institutions in the United States, Cuba and Puerto Rico, while the remainder were sold or are currently on sale.
[9] In 2011, the Foundation published Hard Light: The Work of Emilio Sanchez, edited by Curator Ann Koll, which included essays by John Angeline, Rudi C. Bleys, and Rafael DiazCasas.