Sicilia, Josep Maria

BIOGRAPHY OF JOSEP MARIA SICILIA:

Madrid, 1954

"He is one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties. He began his artistic career studying at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid and later settled in Paris in 1980. There he coincided with two other Spanish artists, Miquel Barceló and Miguel Ángel Campano, also referents, together with José Manuel Broto and Ferrán García Sevilla, of the Spanish painting of that time.

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.

The artist himself has actively participated in the selection of the works that make up this exhibition, a part of which was already presented at the CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux at the end of 1987. These works have now reached the halls of the Palacio de Velázquez as a compact group of paintings that show a Sicilia with a solid career and a long career. (www.museoreinasofia.es)"