Auckland abstract painter Alberto Garcia-Alvarez is a little-known but influential figure in New Zealand art. Born in Spain, he moved to California in 1960 and, in 1973, to Auckland. Garcia-Alvarez works in series, exploring the possibilities of different approaches in parallel. Throughout his career, he has continued to make both gestural paintings and painted constructions. He has also experimented with lithography. He is best known for Collective Mind (1979), his ceramic mural on the facade of the Physics and Mathematics Building at the University of Auckland. Although, he has worked consistently, he has rarely exhibited..Alberto Garcia-Alvarez was born in Spain in 1928 and studied painting at the University of Barcelona. In 1960, he moved to California, where he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and had solo shows at San José Art Centre and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1973, he moved to Auckland where he taught at Elam School of Fine Arts for twenty years. There, he had a huge influence on a generation of artists, including Graeme Cornwall, Stephen Bambury and Judy Millar.