Juan José Ávila Aceves "Kraeppellin" was born on 13 February 1948 in Guadalajara and died on a 13 February, exactly 61 years later, leaving behind a vast body of work produced over more than 30 years of career. His trajectory and his eccentricity made him widely known in the city under the pseudonym "Kraeppellin", taken from the surname of Emil Kraeppellin, the German psychiatrist of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries who founded modern scientific psychiatry. Throughout his artistic and intellectual development he combined it with other names —Juan Adrii "Kraeppellin", "Kepillín", "JF Kraeppellin" and "Juan María Lang Kraeppellin", among others—, Juan Kraeppellin being the last and most frequently used. He lived in close contact with other artists and came to leave a distinctive mark both on his work and on his person, his habits and his attire, defining himself as a "self-taught" and "naïf" creator, a key part of his own creation.

He made his debut as a sculptor during the 1970s, working mainly in alabaster, but also in ceramics, resins, plaster and even modelling clay, with figurative subjects; in that early stage his technique was conventional, though his subject matter was not, and he would later break with it in a provocative and purposeful way. Thanks to his irreverent and eccentric approach, his work moved between figuration and abstraction, addressing freedom of expression, the social system, sexual freedom and spirituality through playful, oneiric, fantastical and erotic passages, in both two-dimensional and sculptural pieces, and he completed his visual discourse with highly poetic titles. He was a remarkably prolific artist, with massive and serial production: his total output is estimated at around 2,500 pieces spread across various public and private collections.