Crossings

Overview

The elusive abstract artist Alberto Garcia-Alvarez is showing his decades-long series of wooden abstracts at the City Gallery.

The Spanish artist works in series, exploring the different possibilities of approaches in parallel to each other. These series can take decades to form. Crossings is an ongoing series of more than 100 painted wooden constructions that the abstract artist began making in Sausalito, California, in 1967. Originally these constructs were purely formal, having no reference or intention other than that of establishing points of attention and/or conflict. However, as Garcia-Alvarez continued working on the series he began making religious and political connotations."The title Crossings refers to the intersection points of objects, or to ideas crossing each other. It also refers to the act of crossing; the crossing over an obstacle or a prejudice", the Garcia-Alvarez explains.

Alberto Garcia-Alvarez is a little-known but influential figure in art. He was born in Spain in 1928, but moved to California in 1960 where he taught at UCLA Berkeley and had solo shows at San José Art Centre and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1973 he moved to Auckland, teaching at the Elam School of Fine Arts for twenty years. Throughout his career he has made both gestural paintings and painted constructions; sometimes experimenting with lithography as well. He is best known in New Zealand for his ceramic mural Collective Mind, which decorates the facade of the Physics and Mathematics Building at the University of Auckland. Although, he has worked consistently throughout the decades, he rarely exhibits.