José María Báez started out as a poet and founded the Zaitun magazine with Rafael Álvarez Merlo in 1968. In the 1970s he turned to painting, but he never really abandoned his lyrical side, which can be seen clearly in his works. In his early years his style was figurative, laden with irony and expressionism, but in the mid 1980s he shifted towards a more constructivist, abstract approach in which words had a constant presence in the form of out-of-context quotes, and colour was linked symbolically with text. He thus blurred the line between poetry and painting in a process of semantic dematerialisation that eventually led to his more recent, abstract work in which the same process is applied to materials: he has produced series of works in oil on paper cut-out and glued in the form of mainly linear nets or weaves and colours that expand across the wall.
His work has appeared in numerous individual and group exhibitions at Spanish galleries since the 1980s. He has also taken part in exhibitions of contemporary Andalusian art and on the links between art and text, such as Arte Contexto [‘Context Art’] at the Canal Isabel II Gallery (Madrid, 1989), La palabra pintada [‘The Painted Word’] at the Provincial Museum of Jaén (1994) and Entre la palabra y la imagen [‘Between Words and Pictures’] at the Luis Seoane Foundation (A Coruña, 2006). In 2011 a retrospective of his work was held at the Puerta Nueva gallery in Cordoba.
José María Báez started out as a poet and founded the Zaitun magazine with Rafael Álvarez Merlo in 1968. In the 1970s he turned to painting, but he never really abandoned his lyrical side, which can be seen clearly in his works. In his early years his style was figurative, laden with irony and expressionism, but in the mid 1980s he shifted towards a more constructivist, abstract approach in which words had a constant presence in the form of out-of-context quotes, and colour was linked symbolically with text. He thus blurred the line between poetry and painting in a process of semantic dematerialisation that eventually led to his more recent, abstract work in which the same process is applied to materials: he has produced series of works in oil on paper cut-out and glued in the form of mainly linear nets or weaves and colours that expand across the wall.
His work has appeared in numerous individual and group exhibitions at Spanish galleries since the 1980s. He has also taken part in exhibitions of contemporary Andalusian art and on the links between art and text, such as Arte Contexto [‘Context Art’] at the Canal Isabel II Gallery (Madrid, 1989), La palabra pintada [‘The Painted Word’] at the Provincial Museum of Jaén (1994) and Entre la palabra y la imagen [‘Between Words and Pictures’] at the Luis Seoane Foundation (A Coruña, 2006). In 2011 a retrospective of his work was held at the Puerta Nueva gallery in Cordoba.