JOSE MARIA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954). Untitled, 1989. Mixed media on canvas.

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CONTEMPORARY AND ACTUAL ART

By Setdart Auction House

Jul 27, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-07-27 08:00:00 2021-07-27 08:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : CONTEMPORARY AND ACTUAL ART https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/contemporary-and-actual-art-7261
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• Lot Description
  JOSE MARIA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954). Untitled, 1989. Mixed media on canvas. Attached certificate issued by the artist. Presents label of the Blum Helman Gallery (New York). Signed and dated on the back. Size: 50 x 50 cm; 77 x 76 cm (frame). This work is contextualized in the same year in which José María Sicilia was awarded the National Prize of Plastic Arts. In addition, during this date, at the end of the eighties, beginning of the nineties, an aesthetic change took place in his painting. It is at this time, when he begins to experiment with the color white, with the intention of creating a game of textures and volumes, deepened in the monochrome. This work is the reflection of this experimentation. An example of this is the mastery in the use of color, converging a whole chromatic range of the same tone, and the attention to the tactile values of the work, playing with crackle and material contrasts. It should be noted that the piece has a label from the famous Blum Helman Gallery in New York, with whom Sicilia began working in 1985, when he moved to New York. 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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