Alberto García-Alix

From Where There Is no Return

4 november, 2008 - 23 february, 2009 /
Sabatini Building, Floor 3

Alberto García-Alix (León, 1956) is one of the most representative photographers of the Spanish artistic scene in recent decades. National Photography Prize in 1999, his thirty-year career is a history of the social and cultural changes experienced since the Eighties in Spain, taken from an autobiographical point and opposed to stereotypes.

García-Álix’s photographs penetrate the aspects that were not shown much in the media during the cultural upheaval in Madrid during the Eighties, while portraying his immediate surroundings, friends and characters of the time and landscapes in his life. Today, the perfection of his portraits and compositions has become a tool that turns inward and which manifests the artist's evolution toward more abstract and poetic postures.

This retrospective exhibition comes from a text created by the photographer, De donde no se vuelve, which the artist translated into video specifically for the exhibition. This action supposes a game of dynamic complicity with an extensive selection of photographs from different periods and formats. The projection articulates the development and discourse of the exhibition, forming with his photographs a whole which traces the artist's career and which explores his aesthetics and technique, while delving deeper into his intellectual and emotional intimacy.

The video supposes an exploration of his personal world from sequences recorded on various trips to China, where he decides to lose himself in order to tell his story. The spectator becomes involved in a transfer to the artist's past and a return to his present, accompanied by a first-person testimony of the author, who narrates with his own voice with the audiovisual piece that gives its name to the exhibition and that is also the axis of it.

The two hundred photographs in the exhibition have been taken between 1976 and 2008, and this is the first time that many of them are shown to the public. The organisation of the exhibition is based on non-chronological cycles which intends for the photographer's understanding of the universe to emerge from the union of all the images and not only of them in themselves, in order to constitute a collection that distils essence, testing, privacy and even spirituality and which opens, for the spectators, the doors to a place from which one does not return.

Exhibition´s details

Organized by: 
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Curatorship: 
Nicolás Combarro