The Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson is hosting a programme of guest works in connection with Masaveu Collection. 20th-Century Spanish Art. From Picasso to Barceló. Pieces by 20th-century artists represented in the Masaveu collections will be shown periodically with the aim of lending greater visibility to these holdings and adding a dynamic to the main exhibition of Spanish art of that century. The works currently featured are two paintings by one of the most prominent artists of the last third of the 20th century: José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954).

Sicilia is one of the most iconic painters of the generation that emerged on the Spanish scene in the 1980s and soon earned widespread international recognition. He is represented in the Masaveu collections by pieces from different periods. The earliest, Mountain Station 2, was shown in 5 Spanish Artists, an exhibition presented by the Spanish Culture Ministry at the Artists Space in New York in 1985 as part of an effort centred on the overseas promotion of artists who, like Sicilia, were calling for a return to painting as opposed to other types of art, especially performance. Using a gestural style that displays similarities with both American Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s and the work of the new German Expressionists of the 1980s, in this painting Sicilia depicts a mountain landscape resulting from a trip to the snow. This image was the continuation of a group of urban landscapes reflecting his experience in Paris, where he lived for a spell.

Concerning Mirrors XIV, executed in the 1990s, is part of a series of pictures made with wax – a medium that characterised Sicilia’s work for some time – of which there are another two in the Masaveu collections. As he himself commented in a later lecture, it is possible to establish a connection between these pieces and the impact going to Pakistan made on him. During that trip he visited a garden of roses which suffered the consequences of the country’s political vicissitudes, and in this series that memory is mixed with patches of red glimpsed in a Parisian apartment and other images related in some way to desire, linking the domestic realm and nature. The depth and transparency of the wax, the combination of colours, chance, the polished surface and the white ground give this work and the whole series it belongs to a completely different appearance to previous ones, as comparison with Mountain Station 2 shows. In fact, the works produced by Sicilia in the last decades of the 20th century successively explore – nearly all in series – a broad variety of themes, formats, surfaces and media, conveying a many-sided image of his career as a painter.