José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) is one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties. He began his artistic career studying at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid and later settled in Paris in 1980. There he coincided with two other Spanish artists -Miquel Barceló and Miguel Ángel Campano- equally referents together with José Manuel Broto and Ferrán García Sevilla of the Spanish painting of the time.
Since his arrival in France, the artist works in large formats and his painting shows a constant evolution. His work is organized in pictorial series where still lifes and representations of tools and domestic utensils (vacuum cleaners, irons, scissors, buckets, etc.) are gathered, as well as views of urban landscapes of Madrid and Paris.
During the mid-eighties he achieved recognition in Spain, France and also New York, with paintings marked by the freedom of gesture, the violence of color and the dynamism of the stroke. His individual exhibition in 1982 at the Trans/Form gallery in Paris, the presentation of his work in Spain in 1984 by the gallery owner Fernando Vijande and his individual exhibition at the Blum Helman gallery in New York in 1985, mark the beginning of a career that has managed to find a consolidated place in the history of contemporary Spanish painting.
He has been awarded with prestigious awards such as the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1989) or the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2015), and his work can be found in institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the MOMA or the Guggenheim in New York.
