2. Artists & stock
3. José-Maria Sicilia
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Jose Maria Sicilia is born in Madrid (Spain) in 1954. He spends his childhood and adolescence under the dictatorship of Franco, then at its slow decomposition stage. In 1975, the year Franco dies, in the euphoric early days of the " movida ", he enters the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. Until 1979, he studies there architecture and then painting. In 1980 (as Miquel Barceló), he moves to Paris, where he becomes friends with Miguel Angel Campano, who has preceded him. It is in the climate of art questioning that shakes the Parisian ”milieu” of the time that Jose Maria Sicilia decides to become a painter.
He spends a few years in New York (1985-1986). Since 1982, he exhibits his works in group shows and exhibitions, at the very beginning in Paris.
Sicilia adheres to the movement of the return to the current materials of traditional painting technique, which means not aesthetics, nor figurative creation nor traditional themes. Sicilia expresses most often with large sizes pieces. The work he presents (in France, Spain and the United States) quickly earns him an international recognition.
Initially, each painting of Sicilia is based on a single subject (landscapes of Spain, Paris quarters, trunks of trees, trash cans, sardines, appliances, tools, mythological characters and animals) declined in series, the subject is only an excuse to a materialized pictorially actively thinking, thinking that the artist expresses in a sensory and emotional manner.
In a second phase, from 1985 and the series "Tulips and Flowers", Jose Maria Sicilia engages in a work of self-erasing that requires from the viewer an experience of time and a slowly immersion in the matter that is now painting.
The artist turns away from the subject, retaining only the color, the title and the dynamic of the lines, developing a work that can be described as abstract. The quality of the work comes then from the relationship between the line and the plane, the background and the shape, the color and the material.
 In 1987, the CAPC of Bordeaux and several Spanish museums dedicate to him an exhibition. Since then, numerous exhibitions present each year thematic units.
Traveling around the Mediterranean and India, Jose Maria Sicilia relates books of watercolors and brief notations. For fifteen years, in Soller, not far from Palma de Mallorca, and in his workshop in Malakoff, the artist creates prints, works on paper or beeswax (submitting to the experience of visibility and invisibility of the plastic image), terracotta sculptures, installations and bibliophiles books.
Representing the historical framework of Post-Modernity, with Juan Muñoz and Miquel Barceló, Sicilia is part of the exhibition "From Picasso to Barceló, the Spanish artists" at the Pierre Gianadda Fondation (Martigny, 2003).

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