Josè Ortega (1921-1990) - Contro Franco

José García Ortega (Arroba de los Montes, 1921 – Paris, December 24, 1990) was a Spanish painter and sculptor.
He was a representative of the social realism of the Spanish Civil War and one of the members of the “Estampa Popular” group, which he also founded. At the age of thirteen, he moved to Madrid, where he began painting and took part in anti-Franco circles, thus linking his later experiences and his work to a strong political and civic commitment. At 26, he was convicted of crimes of opinion, and after his release from prison, his first cycle of woodcuts was published in 1952. In the early 1960s, he began his long exile and moved to Paris, where the International Congress of Art Critics of Verucchio, directed by Giulio Carlo Argan, awarded him 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 exhibitions in 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 prints of the large Reapers suite, inspired by the suffering of agricultural workers. In 1971, he worked on the Ortega±Dürer cycle, sixty prints on the theme of the Spanish Civil War, which were presented at the Nuremberg Museum and later exhibited at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.