“I almost always paint what I fear: the
illness, death, tumors, pain
physical, everything that the poor human animal is
exposed."
For José Manuel Schmill, the essential thing is neither symbol nor allegory, but presence. His painting rejects any closed interpretation: it does not seek to explain or moralize, but to show. Raw, without sentimentality, it exposes a field of forces—material, emotional, and visual—where meaning remains open.
His work is part of a Gothic sensibility, not decorative or macabre, but as an attention to what goes beyond the frame, to the excess of reality. Schmill explores the tension between matter and form, gesture and figure, to let matter paint the world.
Unclassifiable, he chose to place himself outside the usual frameworks of understanding: for him, painting was not a language but an ethic of presence. His art, visceral and lucid, brings beauty and horror, fragility and resistance face to face, and invites us to see without necessarily understanding.
His deep and paradoxical Gothic sensibility unites, without hierarchy, the beautiful and the monstrous, the sensitive and the formless - revealing a radical vision of the living, where each canvas becomes an observation of the world in all its complexity.
schmillart.com EXHIBITIONS AND RECOGNITIONS
• Participation in the Second Inter-American Biennial of Mexico, Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City, 1960.
• Participation in the Third Paris Biennale, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France, 1963.
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, New York, USA, 1964.
• Solo exhibition of drawings, Weyhe Gallery, New York, USA, 1964.
• Exhibition of prints, AAA Gallery (American Association of Artists), New York, USA, 1964.
• Participation in the International Painting Prize, Malmaison (Seine-et-Oise), France, 1964.
• Solo exhibition, Palace of Fine Arts, Rooms 4 and 5, Mexico City (January 27 – March 14, 1976).
• Collective exhibition “Terminus, Zurich, Switzerland, 2011.
• Group exhibition “5th Anniversary Last Rites Gallery”, New York, United States, 2013.
• Individual exhibition – Tribute to JM Schmill, Cervantino Festival, Guanajuato, Mexico, 2017.
• Solo exhibition, HR Giger Museum, Gruyères, Switzerland, 2017.
• Individual exhibition, Atelier ArT-Ig, Solingen, Germany, 2019.
• Solo exhibition, Copro Gallery, Los Angeles, United States, 2019.
• Collective exhibition “A possible universe of drawing in Mexico”, National Center of the Arts, Mexico, 2025.
