There is a question Alberto García-Álvarez asks himself every morning. Not what to paint, not which canvas to return to, not which decade of accumulated work might surface today. The question, he tells me with a quiet laugh, is simply: Should I get up?

He is 98 years old. He gets up. He goes to the studio.

This May, Tim Melville Gallery is presenting a new exhibition of work by García-Álvarez, the latest in a sustained and extraordinary sequence of annual shows that have made him, in his late 90s, one of the most vital presences in Aotearoa New Zealand abstract art. The works have not yet been selected. Tim Melville (Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Atiawa) will come to the studio, move through the accumulated density of the space, and make choices. But to write a preview of this show is to confront the particularity of a practice that rejects the very idea of the preview. No new body of work finished in preparation for exhibition. No theme declared in advance. Only this: 50 years in the same studio—sunk into the slope of a garden, light flooding in from high windows—and the continuous act of making that happens inside it.

García-Álvarez has reflected on this process before, with characteristic clarity. “All my life is here,” he says, when I ask about the way a work from the 1970s might appear alongside something made last week. He means it structurally. The experience of a life does not divide itself into periods, does not respect the historian’s desire for chronology, the collector’s desire for series, the critic’s desire for development. I think of him standing close to a large canvas, poised before his next move, the entire history of the work alive in that stillness. A canvas begun in one decade may be taken up again in another because the thinking it holds has returned—changed, deepened, made strange by distance.

He wants to remain open, so the studio holds everything at once. Past and present are folded into the same continuing act, beyond archive and retrospective, a practice still very much alive.

What strikes me, standing beside him in the studio on his birthday while he talks, is the feeling of freedom—and I say as much to him, cautiously, aware that labels are their own kind of trap. He doesn’t push back. His ideas are consistent with the word, even if he doesn’t reach for it himself. He does not believe in quality as a fixed measure, or in the categories of beautiful and ugly. “Everything is fantastic,” he says, “depending on how much you understand what you are looking at.” He offers an analogy: a person you initially find difficult, even unpleasant, who becomes through proximity, through attention, through time, your closest friend. The artwork, he suggests, operates the same way. Meaning is not given. It is arrived at.

The paintings and constructions are not solved problems, not objects to be judged against a standard of beauty or competence. They are, as he has written himself, moments of a life—“this moment or that moment years ago”—presented to a viewer who brings their own accumulated experience to meet them. The encounter is always a crossing: his interior life and yours, finding each other somewhere in the paint.

Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement (1536-41) comes to mind, that vast surface on which every figure carries the full weight of a human soul. García-Álvarez inhabits the same depth. In his painting, you always get more than you see. It is deeply personal, which is why it resists the binary of good and bad, turning instead toward something harder and more sustaining: the contemplation of life, of inner being, of contradiction as the very substance of beauty. By admitting the ugly, the difficult, the unresolved, he creates a complexity that makes the binary of quality feel beside the point.

It reminds me of Pablo Neruda’s ʻLa Muerta’, in which the poet speaks directly to his lost beloved, love persisting not despite loss but through it, the beloved carried forward in the body and breath of the living. García-Álvarez holds his entire life in the same way, in paint, in accumulated surface, in the act of returning. What matters is the internal condition. Endurance is his method.

He shows us what is possible when a practice refuses to justify itself against the demands of the current moment. I think of Collective Mind, his 1979 ceramic mural on the façade of the Science Building at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, a grid of 295 ceramic blocks advancing and receding into the brutalist concrete, some glazed white, some fired from clay excavated nearby, the whole surface alive with mathematical logic. That it lives on a science building feels entirely right. García-Álvarez has never recognised the boundary between art and science, between feeling and thinking, between the beautiful and the difficult. The mural has held its ground for decades, asking nothing of the passerby except attention.

García-Álvarez is the same. To spend an afternoon in his company is to understand what a rich life looks like. I came for a preview and left with something else entirely. Gratitude.