SICILIA, José María
(Madrid, 1954)
The painter José María Sicilia began his art training at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid. In 1980, after abandoning his studies and moving to Paris, he met fellow artists Miquel Barceló and Miguel Ángel Campano, who together with José Manuel Broto, Ferrán García Sevilla and Sicilia himself went on to become the leading players in a revitalisation of Spanish painting in the 1980s, which was associated with the modernisation process of the newly born democratic Spain. From 1984 onwards, Sicilia produced large-scale paintings representing figurative motifs that made use of materic gesturalism resources drawn from informalist painting. These are works of great dynamism and chromatic power. Applying a non-dramatic but highly emphatic plastic approach, in the style of some German expressionists, his paintings took the form of series devoted to still lifes and landscapes. By the mid-1980s, his work having achieved great national and international renown, Sicilia moved to New York and embarked upon a process of essentialisation that distanced him from the impasto that was characteristic of his first period in Madrid. As from the mid-1990s, this evolution from figuration towards the limits of abstraction began to take firmer shape in the works included in his Flores [Flowers] series, whose motifs, stripped down to bare essentials, are glimpsed slightly through the layers of wax that make up the surface of the canvas, resulting in a painting of enormous lyrical power. Sicilia continued with this line of pictorial investigation until the beginning of the 21st century, at which point he increasingly branched out into drawing and the use of direct materials, on the one hand, and the creation of sculptures and installations on the other.
