Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

El lamento de un perro [A Dog's Lament]

Image caption
ALBERTO GARCÍA-ALIX

El lamento de un perro [A Dog's Lament]

  • 2012
  • Silver gel print on paper
  • 44 x 44 cm
  • Cat. F_171
  • Acquired in 2014
By:
Isabel Tejeda

García-Alix took the two photographs in the Banco de España Collection two years apart in the early 2010s. A Dog's Lament (2011) is part of the series Beloved Homeland, a set of photos taken for his project Looking at Asturias commissioned by the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation (2012). The pictures, shot entirely in the Principality of Asturias, were first exhibited at the Antiguo Instituto Culture Centre in Gijón. A Dog's Lament shows the head of a dog beneath an out-of-focus landscape that takes up almost the entire picture. The animal is gazing out of the frame, recalling the anguish of the Drowning Dog from Goya's Black Paintings (1819-1823, Museo del Prado, Madrid).

San Carlos, a False Horizon (2014), was shown at García-Alix's exhibition 'A False Horizon' at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris in 2014. This exhibition presented an imaginary content with references to dreamlike states and a world which, after apparently undergoing the notarial effect of photography, seems somehow different: 'A world of altered presences trapped in an instant of eternal silence. Here, the visible is a metaphor of itself and of a thought. Thought as revelation nourished by a monologue stretched tight across a horizon. A false horizon...', as García-Alix says. In his most recent work, his photography has become more abstract and symbolic: the mysterious and ghostly building silhouetted against the sky in San Carlos, a False Horizon contains references to loss.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Alberto García-Alix
León 1956

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.

Isabel Tejeda

 
«Beloved Homeland» (Gijón, 2012-2013).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.