Aviles,
He was born in Barcelona, in 1940, like Isabel Steva Hernández, but as a photographer, the way he immersed himself in the sixties, he chose to make himself known as Colita, the nickname that his father put it for having been born under a cabbage, a habitual story then.
His work was as direct as sensitive, sometimes critical but lacking prejudices, and was not characterized both by a defined aesthetic and by the personal notion of this author of ethics and commitment, in a professional and social sense. We cannot say that their images are documented, but that they welcome chosen, embodied experiences and opinions, voluntarily avoiding the artifice and more or less brave artistic claims. Even so, there was no topic that did not decide to grow (she herself was baptized as a photographer SUV) and rejected with forcefulness the manipulations in his works, which he wanted to be as transparent and clear as the experienced experience they reflected themselves.
In the end, their creations, both those derived from orders and those made on their own initiative, keep a close relationship with their temperament, firmness and clear ideas: Colita may be one of the artists in which it is most obvious to appreciate coherence between their life and their legacy; The latter could be interpreted as an articulated photo-biography to the current step in the street.
Throughout their fifty years of professional career, flamenco shows, evidence of the emergence of a new feminism, film stars, figures of the Nova Cançó and of the Gauche DivineTheater that marked time, bullfighting, the urban landscape of Barcelona … It is a work without manifest, oblivious to gurus, methods and teachers: he believed more in the instinct than in the certainties arriving from outside, in the humor than in the canons, and it is impossible to understand his production without approaching his personal universe, his friends, pleasures, ideas, beloved spaces …
About to be completed two years since his death, the Niemeyer center gives Barcelona the exhibition “Colita. Art and part”, which the director and heir of the Colita Photography Archive, Francesc Polop, and that comes to emphasize her “impenitent curiosity”: he captured, systematically, almost everything that brought around, with special attention to cultural events, with special attention to cultural events, with special attention to cultural events, with special attention to Performances, presentations, exhibitions, films of films, concerts) and established such deep ties with those whom he portrayed that, many times, he established lasting friends, which would derive in bartering, complicity and new photographs in which these relationships become very palpable. The human interest of these pieces is often underlined.
There are six of those friends, precisely, that structure the route of this Asturian exhibition: those that he maintained with Carmen Amaya, who announced the world of flamenco; Gabriel García Márquez, who allowed him to delve into his love for literature; Gonzalo Suárez, an important figure in its beginnings as a fixed photo in the cinema; Joan Manuel Serrat, another of his connections with the poetry and the music of the moment (he said Colita that no one had portrayed him as well as she, without sequish); Joan Miró, currently claimed in Palma, who brought her closer to the power of total art; and José Pérez Ocaña, who for its transgressive activism introduced it in queer aesthetics.
His portrait gallery is, in any case, immense, because a worker was a hard worker aware of the importance of leaving testimony of the transition time he knew and the souls that promoted him. Between tenderness and strength, her photos have as a common note the irony, which she understood as a tool for the annoyance of the authorities and that away these creations, and much, from an aseptic photojournalism.
“Colita. Art and part”
Niemeyer Center
Avenida del Zinc, s/n
Aviles, Asturias
From June 25, 2025 to January 11, 2026
