Presentation
Biography
Genín Andrada is a photographer from Extremadura (1963) with a long professional career whose work includes photographic essays, portraits, and documentary photography. His work is characterized by a play of light, color, and volume inspired by the Spanish Baroque.
He began in photography in 1985 as a self-taught photographer, joining El Periódico de Extremadura the following year. Years later he moved to Madrid, combining his photographic work with teaching.
In his first in-depth project, he received a grant from La Caixa to document the effects of AIDS on more than 200 people affected in various European countries and the result of this work was exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1996 and was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Semana Negra de Gijón the following year.
He won numerous awards including six Fotopress prizes organized by La Caixa and one Paris Foto prize received in 1998.
In 2000, his project on the steps of the Spanish conquistadors on the American continent, La Ruta Hacia el Nuevo Mundo, was exhibited in Foto-España 2000 at the Oliva Arauna gallery and won the Paris Photo prize from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. To compose this project, in which he switched to color, Andrada made six trips to Latin America since 1995. On each of them, he followed in the footsteps of one of the great Spanish conquistadors (Christopher Columbus, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Hernán Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, Francisco Pizarro, Francisco de Orellana), and traveled and photographed the routes that led them to the first settlements in the New World (Hispaniola, the South Sea, the Aztec Empire, the Quetzals, the Empire of the Sun, El Dorado).
The Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo de Badajoz (MEIAC) acquired 60 works for its collection in 1999. He also has works in the collections of the MNCARS, the Fonds national d'art contemporain (Puteaux, France), the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, the Museo Pedrilla in Cáceres, ...
Andrada has evolved into a very personal documentary, full of symbolism and creative capacity, as shown in his works Costa da Morta (2001), Saharauis, Benidorm and La fragua de Vulcano (2003) and Microcosmo (Purificación García Prize in 2005).
In 2013 he started the interdisciplinary project Deconstrucción, a reflection on the human being based on the brick crisis.
A contributor to prestigious media such as The New York Times, Geo, National Geographic, El País Semanal, Suplemento Dominical del Diario La República, ..., his numerous exhibitions include his participation in Les Rencontres d'Arles in 1999, his participation that same year in the project Una visión de Puerta Europa; the exhibition America, la ruta del Nuevo Mundo during PHotoEspaña 2000 and the exhibition Regreso a los sentidos, curated by La Fábrica in 2001.
From 2002 to 2004 his series Sida, entre el dolor y la esperanza was part of the project Pandemic: Facing AIDS, inaugurated by Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela and toured the world.
His work is regularly published in: El País Semanal, El Suplemento Dominical del Diario La República, The New York Times, Geo, National Geographic , etc.
