José de León

Carbajal de Fuentes (León) 1958

By: Frederic Montornés

José de León trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid from 1978 to 1983. In 1985 he set himself up at La Nave in Madrid, where he shared a studio sporadically with other artists and staged exhibitions until 1997. In the late 1980s he obtained at Fulbright scholarship that enabled him to travel to New York to extend his knowledge and experience. In 1993 and 1994 he studied at the Spanish Academy in Rome under a grant from the Spanish Foreign Ministry, and in 2002 he moved to Paris, where he lived until 2004. In 2004 and 2005 he made at least three trips to India. In 2007 he moved to Berlin for a one-year residency at the GlogauAir art venue, and from 2010 to 2012 he lived in Beijing, where he threw himself into Chinese art with the same enthusiasm as he did with everything else in his life.

His first exhibition was at the Sala Provincia gallery in León (1980). Since then his works have been shown at many galleries and venues such as the Palace of Nations in Geneva (Switzerland, 1985), the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 2003), the León Auditorium (2003), the Kunsthaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2009), the Cazario de León (La Baña, León, 2014) and the León Museum (2015).