The girls put on high-collared puffer jackets and billowing sports activities jerseys, the materials richly painted in acid yellow and bubblegum pink. Bathed in cool mild towards shadowy backdrops, they appear to glow as they regard the viewer dispassionately with an aristocratic air.
For the previous few years, the Spanish artist Nieves González has taken the earthy backdrops, dramatic lighting and opulent materials typical of Spain’s Baroque interval and pulled them into the future. The artist’s imagined feminine topics possess the demeanor of an formidable noblewoman or devoted saint, however their wardrobes are wholly up to date.
They are additionally imbued with a contact of the absurd: Some maintain pool inflatables or sports activities paraphernalia; others have hair cascading to the floor. Symbols drawn from legendary and spiritual work change into tongue-in-cheek additions, similar to the swan — a nod to Zeus — as a lap animal, or the biblical serpent as a pool tube.
The enjoyment of contemporizing the antiquated previous might really feel akin to the Pope in cassocks and a White Sox baseball cap, or a good medieval meme. But the artist’s reverence for the medium is evident in how she paints, delicately rendering texture and light-weight to romantic impact. A painter since childhood, González’s follow is born from her fascination with Baroque art, and her personal classical coaching at the University of Seville.
“I’m very attracted to the power and intensity contained in the figures, in their postures and their garments,” she defined over e-mail. “Seeing those works again and again was fundamental to understanding them from a pictorial standpoint, and also to imagining other possible interpretations.”
Though already a rising art star, González’s work burst into the mainstream when she painted Lily Allen for her explosive tell-all album, “West End Girl,” after the artistic director Leith Clark discovered her work on-line. In the portrait, Allen seems in a polka-dot robin’s blue puffer jacket and black lace, her cropped bangs framing her brows. Art and vogue publications jostled to interview her as the album cowl took off on-line; throughout Allen’s press tour, “Late Night” host Jimmy Fallon even presented the singer with a actual model of the imagined puffer.
“It was very overwhelming,” González mentioned of the response, as she was immediately flooded with messages on-line. “It was something I didn’t expect and that has generated great visibility for my work.”
Even earlier than “West End Girl,” González’s work was already gaining consideration. In December, her present “Sacred Hair” opened at T293 gallery in Rome, and the Santa Monica, California-based gallery Richard Heller displayed two of her work at Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach. Next up, she’ll exhibit a solo presentation at SC Gallery in Bilbao in February, and one other at Richard Heller in June.
“She’s capturing a certain zeitgeist,” Heller mentioned in a telephone name. “She’s injecting this new life into an age-old genre of portrait painting. And the images are just striking, too.”
González could also be modernizing the vogue codes of classical portray, however she’s additionally emphasizing a longstanding relationship between the two. From the Renaissance onward, paintings often served as a car for brand spanking new sartorial kinds as portraits went on show or traveled between courts. González isn’t trying to seize developments, nevertheless, and focuses extra on what a specific garment may deliver to a picture, she defined. “Quilted coats, athletic shirts or loose garments allow me to construct very sculptural figures.”
She added: “They’re very common items that almost everyone has owned or worn at some point, and that makes it possible for many people to see themselves reflected in them. That mix between the everyday and the monumental is what interests me most in translating to painting.”
In her shared studio house, González retains a disciplined schedule, portray from images and retaining her favourite artists’ books shut by as she works. Lately, she’s been eager about the psychological energy of Spanish painter Diego Velásquez’s masterwork “Portrait of Innocent X,” the searing papal portrait the artist made in 1650, which González not too long ago visited in Rome. Heller, too, mentions the famed portrait when speaking about her work, and the pope’s vibrant, status-projecting crimson cape — not not like the voluminous puffer jacket in its voluminous form, gleaming cloth and authoritative presence.
But Gonzalez’s favourite portray to face in entrance of is Francisco de Zurbarán’s “The Virgin of the Caves” in Seville, wherein a statuesque Virgin Mary, cloaked in resplendent crimson and blue, is flanked by cherubs and she or he blesses the kneeling monks round her. Gonzalez has referenced it immediately in one in all her work; she loves the 17th-century painter’s dealing with of materials, however Mary’s presence strikes her as nicely.
“She makes me think about a femininity that resists all the adversities of history,” she mentioned. “It’s a painting that has accompanied me for years and that I return to almost like a ritual.”