JOSÉ MARÍA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954). "Tulipa 22", 1985. Acrylic on canvas. Signed on the back.

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19th & 20th Century Contemporary Art - Select...

By Setdart Auction House

Jun 17, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-06-17 06:15:00 2021-06-17 06:15:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : 19th & 20th Century Contemporary Art - Select Lots https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/19th-20th-century-contemporary-art---select-lots-7081
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• Lot Description
  JOSÉ MARÍA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954). "Tulipa 22", 1985. Acrylic on canvas. Signed on the back. Provenance: Fernando Bijand gallery, Madrid. Manuel Mayoral Gallery, Barcelona (1996). Exhibitions: José María Sicilia. Dau al Set. Barcelona, October 1986, Cat. 12, rep. Measurements: 220 x 170 cm. In 1985, José María Sicilia worked on a series made up of a large number of studies on the same iconographic element, flowers, which took the form of pictorial manifestations referring to form, characterized by a gradual process of simplification, an increasingly tangible constructive order in the composition and surfaces of marked material expressiveness. There are, among the works that make up this group, significant internal evolutions -which generate different formal and compositional solutions and technical alterations- heirs of two contradictory conceptions of non-figurative painting: on the one hand, the constructivist and geometric art of Malevich and Mondrian; on the other hand, the abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning's works. In "Tulipa 22", the gestural stroke of the brushstrokes acquires the form of a flower close to figurative solutions of representation. It is a tulip, clearly defined on the surface of the canvas, which establishes a play of strong spatial tensions with the background of the composition. This is expressed through an extreme richness of material textures and a violent chromatism, which form a compact and vibrant mesh of broad perpendicular brushstrokes. The tulip stem emerges as the structural element of the composition. It is a line -which, as an abstract value, is already insinuated in the previous series- the result of a gestural action that questions the relationship between surface and depth. Background and figure coexist on the same plane and battle in a space of limits and tensions. Sicilia began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, although 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. Subsequently, it was the various objects of the everyday world that became the protagonists of his works. Vacuum cleaners, irons, scissors, buckets, etc., will be the center of a new language in which Sicilia will grant a greater and progressive importance to the treatment of textures. His work is organized in series on still lifes, landscapes and, the best known, on the Bastille and Aligre neighborhoods, where he himself lives and works. It was in the mid-eighties when his work reached a great national and international projection. In 1986 he presented at the Blum Helman Gallery in New York a group of works that showed a strong purification of the previous style, towards an abstract painting in which he progressively eliminated any formal reference. This new style is reflected in the series "Tulips" and "Flowers". 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 National Prize of Plastic Arts (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 centers.
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