Guipuzcoan painter born in Donostia on 4 May 1932.
He began creating his first impressionist-style works at the age of 17. From 1954 to 1961, he lived in Paris, where he met the painter Manuel Duque. In 1958, he exhibited figurative paintings in Donostia and a year later in Paris. From 1961 to 1963, he lived and exhibited his paintings on time in Ibiza. In 1963, he opened the first free workshop on children's expression in San Sebastian. In 1964, he exhibited at the Edurne Gallery in Madrid. In 1966, he participated in the founding of the ‘Gaur’ group of the Basque school, organising a travelling exhibition throughout the Basque Country. In 1968, he began work on the feature film that he painted directly onto celluloid, Ere Erera Baleibu Icik Subura Arauaren..., and that same year he exhibited in Madrid, Italy, Canada and France. In 1973, he exhibited his work in Washington at the P. A. Health Organisation and in New Orleans. In 1976, he exhibited at Chez Mme. Wolf in Paris. 1958 and 1978, he took part in various collective exhibitions in Donostia, Bilbao, Vitoria, Paris, Italy, Canada, Italy and Mexico, representing Gipuzkoa at the Exhibition of Basque Artists in that country held in 1970. In 1981, he held a retrospective of his work in Durango. Two years later, he created a ceramic mural for Sondika Airport (Bizkaia). He has made several forays into the field of experimental filmmaking, participating in various film festivals (Oberhausen, London, New York, Paris, Brussels, etc.) and receiving a special mention in 1980 at the VIII Festival sull'Arte e di Biografie d'artisti, Asolo, Italy.
In 1982, he won second prize in the ‘Gure Artea’ edition; in 1985, he participated in a collective exhibition in Cologne and in the ‘Arco’ fair in 1986. In 1987, he participated in collective exhibitions (San Sebastián, Bilbao) and individual exhibitions (Bilbao). In 1988, he participated in the group exhibition ‘Vanguardias en Vanguardia’ (Avant-garde in the Avant-garde), and in 1989 he presented his film Impresiones en la alta atmósfera (Impressions in the Upper Atmosphere) at the San Sebastián Film Festival. His most notable works include: Huella, De la tierra, Retrato mágico, Acciones, Las cuatro estaciones, Penetración, Claro en el bosque, Acción vital, Ola y, nube, Nocturno, the Myths and Nudes series, etc. Also worth mentioning is the magnificent mural that the artist painted for the Torres Blancas building in Madrid. His works can be found in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the Provincial Museum of Alava, the San Telmo Museum in Donostia, the French Film Library Museum in Paris, Kutxa, the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, the Bank of Bilbao, the Industrial Bank of Bilbao, and the Caja Laboral Popular in Arrasate and Madrid.
Javier Franco (Bilbao, 1978) sees it this way:
"Perhaps indebted in some respects to the work of Manolo Duque and his personal aesthetic, which was defined in a label that we could boldly translate as “nubism”, Sistiaga develops his vision of the female nude in a spiral of lines that obey only perception from the outset and know no categories other than chance and perspective. The monochrome stroke captures different gradations that obey directly the pressure on generously textured paper. (...).
Due to their characteristics, Sistiaga's nudes—light and shadow in their minimal habitability—do not come together in large masses but rather in almost gestural passageways that reinforce, through their intensity and their own interposition, the concordant action of the 'whole' , responsible for that soft sensation in which his nudes are enveloped; despite the rigour of the monochrome, which is partially resolved by forms that meet and repel each other until they deeply configure the contour, the relief.
Manterola, (Bilbao, 1980):
"Sistiaga, like much of contemporary Basque art, is informalist not only insofar as his work pursues the destruction of the architecture of space characteristic of classical art, but also the destruction of form itself, because, as Della Volpe says, form that is not determined by the intervention of ideas according to the meaning one wishes to express is formless. Such an observation is applicable to Sistiaga's work throughout his life as a painter; not only to his gestural period from 1961 to 1963, but also, more lyrically, to his unforgettable film of 1968, more dramatically to the aforementioned sign mural on the Torres Blancas building in 1970, and even to his current work, the nudes, (...) which, beyond their initial appearance, are unmistakably part of the informal currents closest to Eastern thought, which describe painting as: ‘The fusion of the flow of the spirit with the movement of living things’.
Manterola:
‘The artist who conceives painting as a place of protection, a means of defence and appropriation of nature, who works against memory and steals the shadows of the night in search of the sign of “pure” intuition, takes us back to our origins, to the “magical cave”.’
Nestor Basterretxea, (Bilbao, 1980):
"The first thing that can be said about him is that, along with Oteiza, Ruiz Balerdi, Reinaldo, and a few others, he is one of the few Basque artists who has devoted himself passionately to teaching art. (....) Gesturality, which in Sistiaga has never been exclusive of analytical insight, results in these magnificent works in the concretisation of the organic anatomy of the forest and its vegetal ages. Surprising scales of relationships are established compact forms of dense colours and the brief slivers of light that he intersperses like necessary breaths. He atomises some as nuclear forms, which remain retained, valuing them by contrast with the linear gales of blues and splintered greens, which in these paintings reach the level of the plastic values of the best works of contemporary art".
Review by José de Castro Arines, of Sistiaga's film, Ere Erera Baleibu Icik Subura Aravaren...:
‘A pictorial experience where colour, form, and the uninterrupted mutation of structures and chromatic coverings reached unsuspected and unlimited dimensions. A pictorial world argued in its own combinatorial variations, which at times reached unimaginable levels of beauty.’