Ocaña

"OCAÑA," JOSÉ PÉREZ OCAÑA (Cantillana, 1947–Seville, 1983).
"Portrait."
Mixed media on paper.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 39 x 29 cm; 48 x 38 cm (frame).

Ocaña’s artistic career began in Barcelona, where he moved in 1971 amid Franco’s repression. He studied at the Narciso Galiat School of Art. A leading figure in the cultural revolution of the “Spirit of ’75” in Barcelona—which transformed Las Ramblas into a space of freedom—Ocaña participated, alongside his fellow Andalusians Camilo and Nazario, in the bohemian, provocative, and marginal world of that great multicultural city. A devoted admirer of Marc Chagall’s paintings, Ocaña adopted an artistic approach close to Dadaism, turning his own personality into art. In 1977, Ventura Pons highlighted his work in the film *Ocaña, Intermittent Portrait* and held his first major exhibition at the Mec Mec Gallery, which brought him international recognition and allowed him to travel throughout Europe and the Americas to discover new artistic movements, which he incorporated into his own creative work, based on the icons that form part of Andalusian folk mythology. In 1978, he exhibited at the Quatre Gats Gallery in Palma de Mallorca and created a mural for the Bodega Bohemia in Barcelona. Considered a multifaceted and transgressive artist, a precursor of performance art, he served as the model for Pedro Almodóvar’s character Kike Turmix in his early films and was a key figure in fanzines of the era, such as STAR. In this album of drawings, executed with loose and spontaneous strokes, he immortalizes the people in his inner circle. His painting—expressionist and naïve—was inextricably linked to his way of living and thinking, making these drawings a kind of visual diary.