{"id":116716,"date":"2025-11-04T03:03:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T03:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/116716\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T03:03:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T03:03:12","slug":"in-noelia-towerss-subversive-paintings-troubled-women-are-the-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/116716\/","title":{"rendered":"In Noelia Towers\u2019s Subversive Paintings, Troubled Women Are the Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI like troubled women,\u201d Noelia Towers<\/a> remarked, sitting cross-legged on a large couch in the cozy Chicago apartment that doubles as her studio. Looking at the paintings stacked against the nearby walls, this devotion is clear. Towers captures women, their faces often obscured: One crawls up a darkened staircase; one takes a long drag from a cigarette; one perches precariously on a polished banister. In all the compositions, the mood is ominous, set by a subdued palette and a tunnel vision\u2013like focus on each subject. <\/p>\n

Towers utilizes provocative imagery to create scenes that are as decadent as they are surreal, taking on the intensity of a hallucination or a dream. Her inspiration is largely autobiographical and inflected with urgency: \u201cI need to make what comes out of me and what I really want to make,\u201d she told Artsy. <\/p>\n

Adding to the intimacy of her work, Towers is often the model for her paintings, staging and photographing herself to use as reference imagery. Even when Towers\u2019s likeness isn\u2019t legible in her paintings, her psyche is, via the personal experiences of femininity, trauma, and other charged memories that her work considers. <\/p>\n

What makes Towers\u2019s practice so vital is the way she refuses patronizing narratives of womanhood, instead using images to create space for agency and complexity. \u201cI see men making paintings about these things all the time, and they\u2019re just sexualizing things they haven\u2019t lived through,\u201d Towers stated emphatically. Hers is a much-needed voice, creating a potent visual language for representing women\u2019s interiority\u2014raw, nebulous, and volatile.<\/p>\n

A penchant for self-expression has always run deep in Towers, who started making art during her childhood in Spain. \u201cI was a very social kid, but I needed something that I wasn\u2019t getting from normal child things,\u201d she noted, reflecting on her early desire for a serious creative outlet. <\/p>\n

To meet that need, Towers\u2019s mom found a grassroots organization in their hometown of Barcelona that provided arts education and therapy to underprivileged students. As a result, art and therapy have always been interconnected for the artist\u2014a relationship that\u2019s apparent in her works\u2019 unflinching exploration of self. <\/p>\n

\"Noelia<\/p>\n

Towers turned away from visual art as she grew up, instead diving into the hardcore music scene in Barcelona: \u201cAs a teenager, I was like, \u2018I\u2019m a punk now, and I\u2019m gonna start a band that\u2019s gonna be my life,\u2019\u201d she deadpanned. Aside from her early experiences with art therapy, Towers\u2019s institutional training is limited to her bachillerato\u2014a two-year post-secondary program in the Spanish education system with specialized tracks, including art. Needing to work to support herself, she wasn\u2019t able to pursue higher education in the arts. <\/p>\n

The music scene was where Towers met her partner, a Chicago-based musician, with whom she moved to the city in 2014. There, with the support of her partner, her painting practice reemerged. She found an audience for her work in the city, exhibiting in group shows at Woman Made Gallery in 2018 and Public Works Gallery in 2019. Already, her paintings displayed the photorealistic style, distinct hypnagogic atmosphere, and concerns with the female experience for which she would become known. <\/p>\n

Just because you shouldn\u2019t doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t (2019), first shown at Public Works Gallery, exemplifies this distinctive point of view. It depicts the artist, gagged and handcuffed, sitting at a table. Despite the brazen sensuality of her fetishwear, she looks bored, head resting against her closed hand as she stares into the distance. A plate of garlic inexplicably sits before her. Any eroticism is subverted by the banality of the setting, featuring only a plain tabletop, a white wall, a houseplant, and a wooden door. This liminal realm is wedged somewhere between the bedroom, the dinner table, and a hostage situation. Its unusual subject and narrative ambiguity complicate conventions of femininity and domesticity. <\/p>\n

With increased time at home during the pandemic, Towers\u2019s artistic output continued to flourish. Themes expressed in her first exhibited works expanded: She explored violence, self-preservation, and power dynamics while remaining grounded in the domestic. In \u201cKiller Cute,\u201d a well-received group show at Los Angeles gallery de boer<\/a> in 2021, Towers showed Waiting for you to come home (2021), a sinister image that nonetheless affirms the agency of its subject. In it, a woman is seen from behind wearing a meticulously painted black leather trench coat and matching gloves. She leans against a closed door while concealing a large pair of scissors behind her back, situating her in a position of power over whoever might enter. <\/p>\n

\"\"\"Noelia<\/p>\n

Noelia Towers, Waiting For You to Come Home, 2021. Photo by Jacob Phillip. Courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles & Antwerp.<\/p>\n

Towers\u2019s interest in the abject and in troubled women relates to another inspiration for her practice: film. \u201cI love movies that depict brutality in a way where you can\u2019t look away,\u201d Towers professed. In particular, she\u2019s moved by films that portray the complex, beautiful, and severe reality of women\u2019s lived experiences, such as the work of Chantal Akerman and Catherine Breillat.<\/p>\n

This love underpins the cinematic quality of her work, as seen in Skinned Knee<\/a>(2025), which she showed in a solo show<\/a> at de boer earlier this year. The painting is a close-cropped shot of the bruised, bloody knee of a young woman riding a red bike. The shallow focus of the scene, which obscures the girl\u2019s surroundings in a bokeh-like blur, imitates the work of a camera. Cinephiles may note echoes in the composition of a scene<\/a> from Breillat\u2019s Une vraie jeune fille (1976), in which the young protagonist rides an old red bike around the Landes Forest.<\/p>\n

\"Noelia<\/p>\n

Towers is showing in a dual presentation with one of her artistic idols, the late feminist avant-gardist Birgit J\u00fcrgenssen<\/a>, at Slip House in New York this fall, and she\u2019s excited about the direction her work is taking. She typically paints quickly\u2014necessary to keep up with the powerful images her mind generates\u2014but recently, she has been experimenting with relaxing her hand even further, taking a looser approach to leave evidence of her brushstrokes without sacrificing detail. <\/p>\n

With her ideas multiplying as fast as her exhibitions, Towers has endless facets of herself to mine and human complexities to interrogate. For her, this inquiry is a lifelong commitment: \u201cIt\u2019s all about this world-building experiment,\u201d she said. \u201cCuriosity keeps me going.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Artsy Vanguard 2026<\/p>\n

The Artsy Vanguard is now in its eighth year of highlighting the most promising artists working today. As 2026 approaches, we\u2019re celebrating 10 talents poised to become future leaders of contemporary art and culture. <\/p>\n

Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2026<\/a> and browse works by the artists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Video by Pushpin Films \/ Nathan Lynch for Artsy.<\/p>\n

Thumbnail: Portrait of Noelia Towers by Nathan Lynch for Artsy, 2025; Noelia Towers, from left to right: \u201cRemember Me,\u201d 2021. Courtesy of the artist and de boer; Beautifully Handcuffed Bride,\u201d 2023. Courtesy of the artist and PM\/AM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI like troubled women,\u201d Noelia Towers remarked, sitting cross-legged on a large couch in the cozy Chicago apartment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116717,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[26050,442,498,499,500,82843,501,156,82844,111,139,82842,69,37156],"class_list":{"0":"post-116716","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist-profiles","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-de-boer","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-natalie-jenkins","17":"tag-new-zealand","18":"tag-newzealand","19":"tag-noelia-towers","20":"tag-nz","21":"tag-vanguard"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}