José María Sicilia

Jose Maria Sicilia was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1954. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid from 1975 to 1979; some sources describe him completing his studies there, while others describe him leaving his formal training when he relocated to Paris in 1980. That move placed him at the center of a new generation of Spanish painters working internationally. He spent time in New York around 1985 to 1986, a period during which his work moved toward greater abstraction.

Sicilia became known for paintings built from beeswax, oil, and later silk, bronze, and Japanese paper, materials chosen for their translucency and their capacity to hold and diffuse light. He is reported in gallery and museum bios to have represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1986 and at the Universal Exposition in Seville (Expo '92) in 1992, though independent confirmation of these two dates was limited in current research. His 1988 exhibition of 1987 paintings at the Palacio de Velazquez in Madrid and his 1997 exhibition L'horabaixa, staged in the same building under the auspices of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, are cited by the museum among the defining moments of his career. He received Spain's Premio Nacional de Artes Plasticas in 1989, the Medalla de Oro al Merito en las Bellas Artes in 2015, and the Premio Nacional de Arte Grafico in 2016.

Sicilia continues to live and work between Soller, on the island of Mallorca, and Paris. He remains an active exhibiting artist, with a major 2026 presentation, Noches y dias, staged across several rooms of the Palacio de Liria in Madrid.

Sicilia is consistently described in Spanish and international art criticism as one of the most significant painters of his generation, credited with giving abstraction a material, almost sensory dimension. The New York Times, reviewing an exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art, described his waxen surfaces as refined and seductive, with objects appearing like auras or afterimages through translucent veneers. Writing in Frieze, critic Laurie Attias linked the fragility of his materials, wax, silk, and paper that look as though they might disintegrate, to themes of evanescence and mortality. Spanish institutions including the Museo Reina Sofia and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia's Sicilia en Silos project have framed him as a defining voice of 1980s Spanish painting whose work bridges pure abstraction and material investigation of light.

Sicilia's public auction record is comparatively modest and thinly documented relative to his museum standing. The highest price identified in current research is JPY 6,555,000, paid for Paravent / Little Flowers II at SBI Art Auction in Tokyo on 15 March 2026. Earlier Sotheby's London sales of Spanish contemporary art have reportedly reached GBP 30,000 for Tulipa 18 and GBP 33,600 for Flor Marco Blanco y Negro, though the exact sale date for those two results could not be confirmed. Complete auction-database coverage for this artist is limited in publicly available sources, so no single result can be treated as a certified all-time record, and any figure cited here should be treated as provisional.

Sicilia's market runs on museum and institutional credibility rather than a deep auction record. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and attribution generally rely on the artist's representing galleries, principally Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris and Prats Nogueras Blanchard in Barcelona and Madrid, along with exhibition history at institutions such as the Reina Sofia, MoMA, and the Guggenheim. Public sale volume is low and price data is sparse outside a small number of European and Japanese auction results, including a recent Tokyo sale that produced the highest price identified in current research; collectors should treat any single auction result as a data point rather than a settled market benchmark.