Alberto garcia alix biography of christopher
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Between Heaven and Hell
An eternal adventurer, the Spanish photographer ALBERTO GARCÍA-ALIX, who recorded the rebellious years of la movida madrileña, presents his new road companions
Motorcycles arrived before photography in Alberto García-Alix’s life. He was 12 years old, not a sign of his trademark side-whiskers yet to be seen, when his parents gave him a yellow Ducati. The engine was pretty feeble but those 50ccs seem to have had a more powerful impact on the future photographer’s eye than other elements of his life: the powerful women, the tattoos, the heroin, the rock’n’roll or the Cuba Libres mixed with Negrita rum.
Self-Portrait with Denim Vest, 1989
“On a cycle the frame is gone,” wrote the American Robert M. Pirsig in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). The motocyclist is in the scene, not just watching it. Life on two wheels: the real and constant possibility of a fall; overcoming the powerful blast in your face; the tarmac flowing fast
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Consuelo Varela in conversation with Ignacio Camacho
Christopher Columbus is the protagonist of this event. Sailor and European discoverer of America, history has conferred upon him the status of conquistador. But the man elevated to the rank of hero was also a person, in the most private sense of the term. A leading expert on Columbus, historian Consuelo Varela, will speak about the human side of the sailor, a side perfectly captured in the exhibition she fryst vatten curating, Letters from Columbus. The Americas in the House of Alba, which can be visited in Madrid until next January. The letters she has analysed reflect Columbus's concerns for his children, his personal tastes, and his dismay at injustices. Consuelo Varela, a Seville-born historian, fryst vatten a researcher at the School of Spanish-American Studies, which belongs to the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). A specialist in Christopher Columbus, she was the first woman director of the Reales Alcázares historic royal palace
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‘Each boxing match is a story: a drama without words. Alberto García-Alix’s photographs are also condensed stories, silent but eloquent stories. These are images imbued with a lyricism and stripped of artifice, poetry that always finds a place to settle within the framework: the tension in the foreshortening of a face, the tip of a shoe, a skewered vagina, the body of a bird, fuzzy profiles of a building… Direct poetry that explodes before our eyes with the radiance of a whiplash.
‘If someone put us in the difficult situation of having to choose only one of the topics dealt with by García-Alix in his work, that which summarizes its totality, that would be the human body. Its flesh, bones, and also the light that hides in its gut. And in the end, inescapably, the fight is bound be a body-to-body between Alberto and the light.’ — Alberto García-Alix official website
‘Alberto García-Alix defines his portraits as a confrontation with his own model. Garcia-Alix is one o