title: Alvaro Alvarez
text: # Alvaro Alvarez
  
  Alvaro Alvarez (born San Jose, Costa Rica, 1965), is an artist, working primarily as a painter. He is based in Melbourne, Australia.
  
  ## Career, themes and style
  
  Alvaro Alvarez's recent work combines painting and drawing, based on images from books, magazines and old calendars. After careful examination of this content, Alvarez recreates the imagery in his paintings using a methodical process of fine brushwork and soft lines. Layers of these techniques are often visible on the surface of a finished work where Alvarez has erased evidence of early mark making to begin again, giving the artworks an ethereal quality. As the Sydney Morning Herald writes of Alvarez's practice, "Alvaro Alvarez creates rippling, vibrant paint and texta abstractions from images found online."
  
  Alvarez has exhibited his work internationally and throughout Australia and currently practices at Melbourne studio Arts Project Australia. Alvarez is an important figure in Australian outsider art and has exhibited his works across Melbourne Arts Centre, the Museum of Everything in London and Campbelltown Arts Centre and Monash University Museum of Art.
  
  ## Solo exhibitions
  
  2005
  
  Alvaro Going Solo, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne
  
  ## Selected group exhibitions
  
  2016
  
  Signature Style, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
  
  Tell 'em I'm dead, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
  
  2015
  
  It takes more than 140 characters to write a novel, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne
  
  Home, locations around Melbourne Arts Centre, Melbourne
  
  2014
  
  Renegades: Outsider Art, The Arts Centre Gold Coast, Surfers Paradise
  
  Darebin Art Show, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Bundoora
  
  2013
  
  Repeat. Restate…Reiterate, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne
  
  Walking the Line, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne
  
  2011
  
  Exhibition #4, Museum of Everything, London
  
  Moving Galleries, Flinders Street Station, Melbourne
  
  2010
  
  Melbourne Art Fair 2010, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne
  
  2009
  
  Snapshot, ACGA Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne
  
  2008
  
  Pearls of Arts Project Australia - The Stuart Purves Collection, Ivan Dougherty
  
  Gallery, College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Sydney
  
  Without Borders: Outsider Art in an Antipodean Context, Monash University
  
  Museum of Art, Melbourne, and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney
  
  2005
  
  Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York
  
  Home Sweet Home: Works from the Peter Fay Collection, National Gallery of Australia Travelling exhibition: Tamworth City Gallery, Tamworth NSW, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand
  
  2004
  
  2nd Annual Intuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art, Chicago, United States Hosted by the Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York
  
  2001
  
  Face-Up, Idiom Studio, Wellington, New Zealand
  
  ## Collections
  
  Alvaro Alvarez's work is represented in private collections as well as in the National Gallery of Victoria, the Stuart Purves Collection and the National Gallery of Australia.
  
  