Jose' Ortega Biography
José García Ortega (Arroba de los Montes, 1921 – Paris, 24 December 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, of which he was also the founder. At thirteen he moved to Madrid where he began to make his first paintings and took part in anti-Franco circles, thus linking his subsequent experiences and his work to his strong political and civil commitment. At 26 he was convicted of crimes of opinion, and after prison in 1952 his first cycle of woodcuts was published. In the early sixties he began his long exile and moved to Paris, where he was awarded the gold medal for his action in the fight for freedom by the International Congress of Art Critics of Verucchio directed by Giulio Carlo Argan. In 1964 Antonello Trombadori organized his first solo exhibition in Italy at the La Nuova Pesa gallery in Rome, which was followed by those in 1968 and 1974. In the following years he held numerous exhibitions in Philadelphia, Toronto, Saint Louis, Zurich, Turin and Brussels. In 1969 he created the twenty engravings of the large suite of the Segadores, inspired by the suffering of the workers of the land. In 1971 he worked on the Ortega±Dürer cycle, sixty engravings on the theme of the Spanish Civil War presented at the Nuremberg Museum and then exhibited in the Sforzesco Castle in Milan. He moved to Matera in 1973, where he had his laboratory in the headquarters of the La Scaletta nei Sassi cultural club, experimenting with new techniques in sculpting bas-reliefs and using papier-mâché together with the master papier-mâché makers of Matera in an innovative way; here he created one of his most important pictorial cycles, Death and Birth of the Innocents, presented at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan and kept and exhibited at Casa Ortega in Matera. At the entrance to the town you can admire its famous majolica which depicts the revolutionary Risorgimento movements of 1828 which took place in Bosco. After his death in 1990 in Paris, a group of over 50 Spanish painters, writers and sculptors paid homage to him with an exhibition in the Villanueva Gallery in Madrid. Ortega was an exponent of that pictorial realism that characterizes the work of many Italian painters, such as Guttuso, Migneco, Cantatore and Guerricchio. He was defined as the painter of the peasant world for his constant attention to the humblest classes who have always inspired his work; the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, taking inspiration from the Segadores of Ortega to whom he dedicated the poem Ortega de segadores, invented the term ortegano to indicate the conditions of oppression experienced by the Spanish peasants. Furthermore, some of his works were donated to the Art Museum of Savona named after Sandro Pertini, his great friend. On 15 September 2010, the Liceo Artistico Paritario dedicated to the great painter was inaugurated in Bosco. On March 18, 2011, the "Casa Ortega" Museum was inaugurated in the small Cilentan hamlet. His remains rest in Paris, in the Montmartre Cemetery. In 2014, a laboratory museum dedicated to him, Casa Ortega, was inaugurated in the house where he lived, in the Sassi of Matera.
