Flower Bunch I was painted in 1985, a decisive year for José María Sicilia's international recognition. The Spanish Ministry of Culture presented an exhibition entitled 'Five Spanish Artists' at Artists Space in New York, which included work by Sicilia alongside Miquel Barceló, Miguel Ángel Campano, Menchu Lamas and Ferran García Sevilla. In the same year, his paintings were also shown in 'Four Spanish Artists', at the Frumkin & Struve Gallery in Chicago, and 'Europalia', at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent.

José María Sicilia's work invited the viewer to consider the construction of the image at a time when there was much talk of the 'return of painting'. As in other works from the same period, in Flower Bunch I the artist uses an impastoed and random brushstroke, chiaroscuro and the abstract tradition of informalism with which he was so familiar, contrasting it in the same space of the canvas with a constructivist geometric language through which he arranges the colour like the shades of a flag.

Considered by historian Kristian Leahy as 'the leading representative from the 1980s of pictorial post-structuralism, of the postmodern deconstruction of abstract painting', his art resembles the work of an image editor. Only a year before he painted Flower Bunch I, we can already see the recurrent element of the flower appearing in his work. To quote Leahy's exhaustive study of 'the poetic deconstruction of the abstract avant-garde in the painting of José María Sicilia (1985-1987)', 'As we know, the thematic choice of the flower —so characteristic in José María Sicilia's art— is first seen in some paintings he made before travelling to New York, Flores tV [tV Flowers] and Ramo de flores sobre una mesa [Bunch of Flowers on a Table], from 1984. These constitute the starting point of a series that would evolve towards the annulment of figuration as a motif and the consequent consolidation of abstraction in his work throughout the decade'.

Beatriz Herráez