José María Sicilia (Spanish, b.1954) is a painter who uses oil and wax in his evocative abstracted and representational paintings. Born in Madrid, Sicilia studied at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, and traveled extensively, moving to Paris and then to New York as a young man. Sicilia worked initially in an abstracted style, painting thin layers of wax atop his surfaces, or using wax as paint in his compositions. More recently, he has created large-scale works of flowers and butterflies painted onto beeswax-coated board, in investigations of light and shadow and explorations of literary references. Sicilia has shown his works internationally, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, the Bordeaux Musée d’Art Contemporain, and the Nagasaki Prefecture Museum of Art. He currently divides his time between Mallorca, Spain and Paris.