In the current issue of recently relaunched Art News magazine, writer Dina Jezdic observes that “to write a preview of [Alberto Garcia-Alvarez’s] show is to confront the particularity of a practice that rejects the very idea of the preview.
No new body of work finished in preparation for exhibition. No theme declared in advance. Only this: 50 years in the same studio, sunk into the slope of a garden, light flooding in from high windows – and the continuous act of making that happens inside it.”
“All my life is here”, 98-year-old Alberto says, when she asks about the way a work from the 1970s might appear alongside something made last week.
“He means it structurally”, Jezdic explains.
“The experience of a life does not divide itself into periods, does not respect the historian’s desire for chronology, the collector’s desire for series, the critic’s desire for development. A canvas begun in one decade may be taken up again in another because the thinking it holds has returned – changed, deepened, made strange by distance.”
