Jose Maria Cano

Jose Maria Cano Andres was born on 21 February 1959, reported as Madrid, Spain. From 1982 to 1998 he was a member and the principal composer of Mecano, one of the best selling Spanish pop groups of the era, before shifting his focus entirely to the visual arts.

His art training is not fully documented. Interviews describe early drawing and painting study at the Rafael Hidalgo de Caviedes and Artaquio academies in Madrid, and the start of university level architecture studies, but no source confirms a completed degree, an institution name, or a graduation year.

Cano began working professionally as an artist around 2002. His first exhibition, "50 Shark Teeth," was staged in 2004 at Craig Robins' Private Space in Miami's Design District during Art Basel Miami, curated by Ambra Medda. The Mexican gallerist Ramis Barquet saw the show and commissioned Cano's first commercial gallery exhibition, "Todos Somos Diferentes," at Galeria Ramis Barquet in Monterrey in 2005, launching a run of international exhibitions.

Cano became known for "The Wall Street 100," a series of paraffin wax, or encaustic, portraits enlarging Wall Street Journal caricatures of business and political figures to comment on capitalism, wealth, and power. He later produced "Apostolate," a set of twelve resin on canvas portraits of the disciples of Christ, shown at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2019 to 2020. A related project, "Apostolados: Jose Maria Cano and El Greco," paired his work with El Greco's at the Catedral Primada de Toledo in 2020.

In 2017, Artnet News reported that Cano was among the individuals named in the Paradise Papers as the holder of an offshore company registered in Malta, in the same reporting that documented his Jack Ma auction result. He lives in London, in a Kensington house where J.M. Barrie is said to have written Peter Pan in 1904.

Gallery and museum materials tend to frame Cano's work through its technique and subject matter rather than through independent critical debate: Kristy Stubbs Gallery presents The Wall Street 100 as a sustained commentary on capitalism, wealth, and power built from his encaustic, wax based process, while the San Diego Museum of Art frames Apostolate as a continuation of two decades of painting practice. Much of the wider coverage of his career treats the crossover itself, a former pop musician commanding six figure prices as a painter, as the more notable story than any single critical verdict on the work.

Cano's auction record is WS100, Jack Ma, a wax portrait of the Alibaba founder that sold for USD 414,355 (rounded to USD 414,000 in some secondary accounts) at Sotheby's Hong Kong in April 2017. The sale roughly quadrupled his previous high, a 2013 Christie's London result of USD 120,433 (GBP 74,500) for a portrait titled Milton Friedman. Artprice records 41 auction appearances for Cano, predominantly paintings, indicating a market that is active but comparatively thin next to blue chip contemporaries, so individual sale results can swing widely depending on subject and region.

Cano has no catalogue raisonne and no certificate of authenticity program; works are generally sold through galleries such as Kristy Stubbs Gallery in Dallas and through major auction houses, and no single exclusive current gallery representative is documented in the public record. No major art prizes or institutional honors are documented in the public record, so his standing rests on exhibition history, including the San Diego Museum of Art and the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery, rather than on a formal award record. Because his auction history is comparatively small and concentrated in a handful of high visibility portraits, collectors should treat any single result, including the Jack Ma record, as a data point tied to a specific subject and sale rather than as a stable trend line.