José María Guerrero Medina (Jaén, 1942) is a painter and sculptor with his own unconventional language that goes beyond fashions and trends and has been widely recognized by relevant national and international collectors and critics. He is one of the main representatives of the Spanish expressionist figuration of the second half of the twentieth century.
Established in the Empordà, he has been linked, in recent decades, to the Fundació Vila Casas, Barcelona, which recently held a vast exhibition of Guerrero’s works that occupied the entire space of the Volart venue of a retrospective in 2020.
His work consists of landscapes, and the human figure, incorporating social denunciation (accusation) in historical episodes, as for exile.
Highlights include his works La cadira de la mort, dedicated to Puig Antich; Way of exile, on the republican retreat or the confinement in Argelès with the diptych Platja d'Argelès.
His figures are men and women, some historical - he has covered some of the works of the baroque artist Velázquez, recovering and recreating secondary characters from his paintings - or contemporary that Guerrero paints in distorted positions and attitudes.
What stands out most in his works are the colors, intense blues and reds that he contrasts with earthy colors such as grays and ochres. Figures well delimited by thick black lines, sometimes fragmented and created from a chromatic play designed to be representative of the artistic language of the artist.
