José María Lillo was born in Cuenca in November of the year 56; nine years before the opening of the Museum of Abstract Art of the Hanging Houses of Cuenca. At the age of 15, he participated in his first collective exhibition where Fernando Zóbel liked the work and from there began a relationship of learning and friendship until his death. He lives and creates bonds of friendship with Gustavo Tornér, Gerardo Rueda, José Guerrero and a large number of Spanish abstraction artists.

Since 1980, when he held his first individual exhibition at the EGAM Gallery in Madrid, for which he was selected to participate in the "First Salon of the 16" at the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Art and in "Preliminary", an exhibition that toured several cities. Spanish and it was a failed attempt to recover national exhibitions, until today he has not stopped regularly exhibiting his work, mainly in Spain and the United States.
He is a professor of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca, of which he has currently been Dean and Director of the Department of Art at UCLM.

His work is represented in collections and museums, among which are the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art of the Hanging Houses of Cuenca, the Juan March Foundation, the La Caixa Collection, the Antonio Pérez Foundation, the Santa Cruz Museum, the Museum of the University of LA California and a good number of private collections.

Texts about his work have been written by such prestigious authors as Ángel González, Juan Manuel Bonet, Fernando Huici, José Ramón Danvila, Miguel Logroño, Mercedes Lazo, Santos Amestoy, AM Campoy, Tomás Paredes, Francisco Calvo Serraler, Javier Rubio, among many others.