José María Sicilia

JOSÉ MARÍA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954).
“Roses,” 2003.
Colored pencils on Japan paper.
Work exhibited in the show “El peso de las lágrimas.” Soledad Lorenzo Gallery. 2004.
Reproduced in the official catalog of that exhibition.
Bears a Soledad Lorenzo Gallery label on the back.
Measurements: 50 x 50 cm; 67 x 67 cm (frame).
The work *Rosas* is part of José María Sicilia’s artistic exploration of nature, memory, and the fragility of images. Through a delicate layering of colored pencils on Japanese paper, the artist constructs an atmospheric composition in which the floral forms seem to emerge and fade away on the surface. The roses, barely defined, blend into a succession of chromatic glazes dominated by shades of mauve, pink, green, and yellow.The floral motif has occupied a central place in Sicilia’s career since the mid-1980s, when he began an exploration of the representation of flowers that gradually moved away from naturalistic depiction to explore their abstract and sensory possibilities. In this evolution, the image appears to undergo a process of dissolution, as if memory retained only its chromatic imprint.
In 2003, José María Sicilia continued to explore the floral motif, which had been central to much of his work since the late 1980s, but he approached it increasingly from a poetic and abstract perspective, moving away from naturalistic representation. It was a year of intense international exhibition activity: he presented *La luz que se apaga* at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, a series of paintings created that same summer in which flowers became metaphors for life, the universe, and their inevitable disappearance. He also exhibited *Dar a luz* in Pamplona and showed his work in galleries in London, Braga, Brussels, and Madrid
José María Sicilia trained at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, moving to Paris in 1980, where he began his professional career and held his first solo exhibition at the Trans/Form gallery in 1982. A leading figure in the renewal of Spanish painting in the 1980s, he achieved international recognition with his “Tulips” and “Flowers” series, in which he explored the relationships between nature, light, matter, and abstraction. His career has been honored with the National Prize for the Visual Arts (1989), the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts (2015), and the National Prize for Graphic Art (2016). Her work is included in major public collections and international museums, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée National d’Art Moderne–Centre Pompidou in Paris, the IVAM in Valencia, and the National Gallery of Australia.