José María Sicilia

JOSE MARIA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954).
Untitled, 1997.
Mixed media (oil, beeswax and collage) on paper.
Provenance: Joseph Helman Gallery.
Measurements: 46 x 33 cm; 58 x 49 cm (frame).

Wax was for Sicilia an expressive medium as valid as pigment. He often combined its textures to convey poetic reflections, as in this flower. Here, the white background gives way to a weightless space in which the flower of intense iridescent and crimson petals emerges. His themes were the transience of life, beauty and memory.

Sicilia began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, but 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. It will be in the mid-eighties when his work reaches a great national and international projection. In 1986 he presents at the Blum Helman Gallery in New York a group of works that shows a strong purification of the previous style, towards an abstract painting in which he will progressively eliminate any formal reference. 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 Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (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 art centers and museums.