Josè Ortega (1921-1990) - El Buscon di Queredo

José García Ortega (Arroba de los Montes, 1921 – Paris, 24 December 1990) was a Spanish painter and sculptor. He was a representative of social realism of the Spanish Civil War and one of the members of the group "Estampa popular", of which he was also a founder. At thirteen he moved to Madrid where he began to create his first paintings and took part in anti-Franco circles, thus linking his later experiences and his work to a strong political and civil commitment. At 26 he was convicted of opinions crimes, and after a prison term in 1952 his first cycle of woodcuts was released. In the early sixties he began his long exile and moved to Paris, where he was awarded by the International Congress of Art Critics of Verucchio directed by Giulio Carlo Argan the Gold Medal for his struggle for freedom. In 1964 Antonello Trombadori organized his first solo exhibition in Italy at the La Nuova Pesa gallery in Rome, followed by those of 1968 and 1974. In the following years he held numerous exhibitions in Philadelphia, Toronto, Saint Louis, Zurich, Turin and Brussels. In 1969 he produced the twenty engravings of the grand suite The Reapers, inspired by the suffering of the farm workers. In 1971 he worked on the Ortega±Dürer cycle, sixty engravings concerning the theme of the Spanish Civil War, presented at the Museum of Nuremberg and later shown at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.