José María Sicilia

JOSE MARIA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954).
Untitled, 1995.
Mixed media (wax) on paper.
Joan Prats Gallery stamp on the back.
Measurements: 19 x 27 cm; 38 x 46 cm (frame).

José María Sicilia not only used the motif of bees (often related to hard work and laboriousness) as an essential part of his artistic language, but also used wax as a plastic material to give corporeality to his creations.

Sicilia began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, although in 1980 he abandoned them and moved to live in Paris. Two years later he presented his first solo exhibition, in a style in line with the neo-expressionism then fashionable in Europe. Subsequently, it was the various objects of the everyday world that became the protagonists of his works. Vacuum cleaners, irons, scissors, buckets, etc., will be the center of a new language in which Sicilia will grant a greater and progressive importance to the treatment of textures. His work is organized in series on still lifes, landscapes and, the best known, on the Bastille and Aligre neighborhoods, where he himself lives and works. It was in the mid-eighties when his work reached a great national and international projection. In 1986 he presented at the Blum Helman Gallery in New York a group of works that showed a strong purification of the previous style, towards an abstract painting in which he progressively eliminated any formal reference. This new style is reflected in the series "Tulips" and "Flowers". In the nineties this reductionist aesthetic will affect the chromatic range, leaving the forms suggested by the reflection of light on the surface. A new material treatment of subtle poetic resonance, based on waxes that let floral themes slightly transparent, brings color back to an already fully consecrated work. José María Sicilia has been awarded the National Prize of Plastic Arts (1989), and is represented in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York and the CAPC in Bordeaux, among many other centers.