Sicilia, Josep Maria

BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEP MARIA SICILIA:

Madrid, 1954

«Es uno de los representantes más significativos de la pintura española de los años ochenta. Empezó su carrera artística estudiando en la Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando en Madrid para después instalarse en París en 1980. Allí coincidió con otros dos artistas españoles, Miquel Barceló y Miguel Ángel Campano, también referentes, junto a José Manuel Broto y Ferrán García Sevilla, de la pintura española de esa época.

Since his arrival in France, the artist works in large formats and his painting reveals a constant evolution. His work is organized in pictorial series where still lifes and representations of domestic tools and utensils (vacuum cleaners, irons, scissors, buckets, etc.) are gathered, as well as views of urban landscapes of Madrid and Paris.

During the second half of the eighties, he achieved recognition in Spain, France and also New York, with paintings marked by the freedom of gesture, the violence of color and the dynamism of the stroke. His solo exhibition in 1982 at the Trans/Form gallery in Paris, the presentation of his work in Spain in 1984 by the gallery owner Fernando Vijande and his solo exhibition at the Blum Helman gallery in New York in 1985, mark the beginning of a career that has managed to find a consolidated place in the history of contemporary Spanish painting.

The group of works in this exhibition at the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid consists of twenty-six canvases, most of them three meters in size and square format, to which is added a group of sixteen works divided into two series with an elongated format and great height. All of them are part of the most recent work of José María Sicilia, the result of a long period of research and testimony of a profound transformation.

The image of the flower, which appears for the first time in his works in New York, is one of the few figurative traces that separate the artist from complete abstraction and is the motif that dominates this exhibition. The canvases in the exhibition, all made with acrylic, summarize a way of conceiving painting inherited from geometric art, while intertwining family airs that refer to abstract expressionism.

El propio artista ha participado activamente en la selección de las obras que componen esta exposición, de las cuales ya se presentó una parte en el CAPC Musée de arte contemporain de Burdeos a finales de 1987. Estos trabajos han llegado ahora a las salas del Palacio de Velázquez como grupo compacto de pinturas que muestran un Sicilia de sólida carrera y largo recorrido. (www.museoreinasofia.es)»