Medal - 2007 TFP Award; José Hernández

José Hernández: Belonging to a family rooted in Tangier for generations and mostly from the province of Cádiz, Pepe Hernández—as he is known in the artistic community—exhibited his first works at the Librairie des Colonnes in his hometown in 1962. From 1964, he moved to Madrid, although since 1980 he has also shared his residence and studio with Antequera, a city in Málaga.

José Hernández began his studies in printmaking in 1967, and has since produced a wealth of graphic work, including numerous editions of bibliophile books. His most notable illustrations include texts by James Joyce, Jean Arthur Rimbaud, and the Spanish authors Luis Buñuel and Ángel González. In addition to his extensive work as a painter and engraver, he also works as a book illustrator, set designer, and costume designer for theater and film projects. Hernández has developed a highly personal style that blends meticulous drawing techniques with a world of symbolic and magical connotations marked by pictorial surrealism. Central themes in José Hernández's painting, meanwhile, are the human figure and architecture, both in the process of decomposition and ruin, inviting a continual reflection on the transience of all living things and the inexorable passage of time. Monsters and ruins are charged with literary symbolism, always referencing a theatrical space, unstable and in perpetual flux.

José Hernández has received various national and international awards in Spain, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, and Norway, most notably the 1981 National Prize for Fine Arts. A full member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in Seville, he also belongs to the European Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Fine Arts in Paris. In 2006, he was named an Adopted Son of the Province of Málaga and received the National Prize for Graphic Art. He is currently the Academic Delegate in charge of the National Chalcography of Madrid. In 2007, the Royal Mint Foundation awarded him the Tomás Francisco Prieto Prize.