ALBERTO GARCIA-ALIX (Kunst)

*****
1956, SPAIN

Alberto García-Alix is one of the most important names in contemporary European Photography. His work, charged with great intensity and profound poetry, has stunned the world of visual arts, creating his own complex universe. His portraits reflect the spirit of a generation.
Photographer, writer and video artist, García-Alix has presented countless exhibitions since 1981 including his first retrospective in Photoespaña Festival (1998), the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Arts (2002), Les Rencontres Internationales de Arles (2007) or the Spanish
National Museum Art Center Reina Sophia (2008). Recently he has show his work in important art centers in Beijing, in México DF and Moscow.
He has received prestigious prices as the Spanish National Photography Award and his work
is placed in great collections as the Deutsche Börse Collection in Germany.

The group of photographs from his early years, ‘76 to ’86, are shot in 35mm format and with the majority taken from the artist’s private collection of vintage prints from that period. It is a very intimate group, in which the artist portrays in an almost natural manner his life, his
environment, Madrid in the early ‘80’s. A period of enormous transcendence both culturally and politically for Spain.
At the close of ’86 begin photographs in medium format and a great endeavor to understand the portrait with compositions always intimately bound to the artist’s own life. His friends, the landscape of the environment in which he lived, all came to be called “Beneath the lights of the mud walls”. Portraits and landscapes of extreme beauty served as the foundation and evolved into the spine of the artist’s oeuvre. The decade of the 90’s and entering into 2000. More extreme photographs, in which Garcia-Alix challenged himself as a photographer and challenged the viewer. Impossible compositions, twisted bodies, animals, incredible personalities all populate this area, grouped into a concept now in use by the artist: “The loneliness of my delirium.”
It is always said of this creator that he creates an epic body of work, it is a sort of mythology told in the first person. A mythology of the ground, tethered to the asphalt, formed by the persons and landscapes of his life, Spain in the 80’s (far from the Movida topic), the cities
where he has lived: Madrid, Paris, Beijing, and his interior universe.
We can observe the enormous evolution his artistic practice experienced since the early years, with rounded formats, mostly nude portraits, up-close leaving no possible escape, landscapes that transport us to parallel realities. The poetry of the image in the eye of the artist.

www.ALBERTOGARCIAALIX.com