Alberto García-Alix

León 1956

By: Isabel Tejeda

Alberto García-Alix was born in León, but moved to Madrid with his family as a child. At the age of twenty he left home and discovered photography; he met José Alfonso Morera, El Hortelano, and Ceesepe, with whom he founded Cascorro Factory, which published fanzines and underground newspapers. He held his first exhibition in 1981 at the Buades Gallery in Madrid, where the influence of photographers August Sander, Diane Arbus and Walker Evans was already evident in his black and white work. During the 1980s, he made album covers for groups from the so-called 'movida madrileña' music scene, fashion shoots, his first short films and a large number of portraits. In the late 1980s he founded the art collective and magazine El Canto de la Tripulación. During this period, his pictures offered a raw, stark account of his everyday experience, his cultural environment and his friends. In 2003 he moved to Paris for a few years, where he made his first introspective videos, comprising photographs and audios of his texts, which he voiced over himself. Following his return to Madrid in 2005, he spent several working sojourns in China. His work gradually became more abstract, moving towards mysterious, dreamlike and emotionally charged images in which large-format urban landscapes take centre stage.

Alberto García-Alix has exhibited at the University of Valencia (1989 and 1991); the University of Salamanca (1994); Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid, 1998); the Tecla Sala Cultural Centre (Barcelona, 2001); Sala Rekalde (Bilbao, 2001); Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2004); the Centre for Contemporary Culture (Barcelona, 2007); Les Recontres d'Arles (Arles, France, 2007); the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2008); the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris, 2014); Castilla y León Museum of Contemporary Art (Leon, 2001 and 2015); and Tabacalera (Madrid, 2016). He has won the National Photography Award (1999); the Bartolomé Ros PHotoEspaña Photography Award 2003 and the Comunidad de Madrid Photography Prize (2004). In 2014, he was shortlisted for the Photographer's Gallery Deutsche Börse Prize.