Albert García Álvarez was born in Barcelona in 1928. His father ran a print shop, which meant that there was always a favourable ambience for the visual arts, with paper, pencils, colours and drawing pads everywhere. From a young age Albert stood out for his creative capacity, coming up with stage designs and perspectives and creating figures and games with paper and cardboard. This was confirmed when studying at the Jesuit Col·legi Sant Miquel, where Father Vergés decided to encourage young Albert’s talent by letting him draw in a separate room from his classmates.
After the Civil War, when he was 11 years old, he signed up for a course in commerce and continued to work in his father’s graphic arts print shop, where his future was secure. However, this was not what Albert had in mind, as he studied the three high school years he was missing in the evenings to qualify to enter the Llotja art school.
When he was young he was one of the founders of the Flamma group, constituted in March, 1948, by several fellow students at the Sant Jordi Superior School of Fine Arts: Joan Lleó, Domènec Fita, Romà Vallès and Francesc Carulla, as well as García. The group became known for its work in religious mural painting and for its activity in the studio-workshop on Carme Street, in old Barcelona. The group disbanded as its members moved on, without involving any sort of rupture. The final year of Flamma was around 1957, when the group was commissioned to do the painting and sculpture for the Saint Sebastian Chapel at the parish church in Tossa de Mar.
In this early period his work was figurative, although it also featured some of the formal characteristics of his later art, such as strongly-defined, expressive lines. He was also know for his keen interest in large scale work, surely arising from the influence of working in mural painting. However, after this initial period with Flamma, Albert García’s painting practice shifted towards abstract expressionism, which still distinguishes his production.
An important turning point in his career came in February, 1958 (some 60 years ago), when he did his last exhibition in Barcelona before the current show. It was held at Sala Jaime’s, and featured a body of expressionist and abstract work with powerfully linear purity. Shortly afterwards he got married to Marian McEntire (who he had met during a stay in Italy), and went to live with her in Mallorca. The period of time on the Balearic Islands would be the starting point of a long, experiential journey that would take him first to the United States and later to New Zealand, where he would finally settle and still lives.
After a relatively short period in Mallorca, in 1960 he decided to move to San Francisco, where Marian was from. The change did not involve a break in the artist’s career, as he was soon working and showing again. He gave classes in various university colleges and created and coordinated a number of masters programmes in the decade he spent in the United States. During this time he was commissioned to do various murals, including the walls and stained glass windows for Saint Louis Bertrand Church, in Oakland (1962), and the mosaics for the Saint Joachim Catholic church, in Madera, California (1965).
As a result of his time in the United States, García Álvarez came into more direct contact with geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism, in the legacy of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. He was also able to draw from detailed knowledge of the work of artists like Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, key figures in abstract expressionism and colour field painting.
In 1972 he was offered a position as Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, which he took. Although in principle he was to be a visiting professor for a year, the post became permanent; he worked there until retiring in 1995. In this regard we should emphasize Albert García Álvarez’s commitment to education, as during his time at Auckland he was head of the Department of Graphic Arts, director of the masters programmes and full professor.
When in New Zealand he combined teaching with creative dedication, so that even while consciously distancing himself from the art market, he would end up doing various solo shows and participating in many group exhibitions. As an art teacher, he was widely appreciated by his students from the very start. His knowledge of art theory and his determination to base his method on exploring creativity, while ignoring anything trivial, was what set him apart, as he became the mentor for an entire generation of art students, who followed him with the idea of making a combination of artistic practice and education a way of life.
Albert García Álvarez is a proponent of art for art’s sake, upholding the idea that themes in art should only be a pretext (if they have to appear at all) for creative practice. He does not believe in the notion of style, since for him creating means finding harmony in the finished work, which might allow him to be reflected in it. As García Álvarez sees it, art is action, so that when he creates he does not want to communicate anything, even while he does consider the emotions behind the work, the will to verbalize and explain them, to be important. This is a concept he has quite consciously sought to transmit to his students at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland.
Apart from his wide-ranging artistic production, mention should be made of his literary work on the subjects of art and research, thinking not only about what has been published but also about what has not. He has also produced many art books, including an illustrated English translation of the Llibre de les bèsties [The Book of the Beasts], by Ramon Llull, amongst many others.