NOELIA TOWERS
Outdoor Theatrics
Artist Reception: September 7th, 6-8 PM
September 7th - October 7th, 2022
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With a folkloric kink towards her own biography, Noelia Towers mines layers of displacement, despair, humor and joy in her first New York solo show. The Catalan - now a Chicago resident - regularly uses childhood memories like her grandmother’s scissors or a flower vase in the shape of a shoe as vehicles for expansive symbolism. She cites a diverse range of influences from Ramon Casas to Joaquim Sunyer to Birgit Jurgenssen. In “Not Christina’s World” the artist riffs off the famous Andrew Wyeth painting at MoMA, only in Towers’ universe there is no house on the hill to return to and our subject is sheathed in a bondage of self. “My subjects are dark but my colors are bright,” says Noelia. This juxtaposition is evident in paintings like “Humiliated” and “Luke Warm Milk,” where forces off-screen exert their agency upon the action depicted.
While the compositions are almost exclusively self-portraiture, this exhibition does feature the painter’s first full -face pictorial. We see a snail marching across Noelia Towers’ regal countenance, eyes closed, as though to deny the viewer a true glimpse inside her . “I felt like that would be giving away too much.”
Noelia Towers is a Chicago based artist born and raised in Barcelona. Towers laboriously detailed paintings investigate the relationship between pain and pleasure. Her practice centers around personal experiences like chronic illness and in most instances the artist uses herself as a subject. Towers has exhibited her work at Woman Made Gallery and Public Works Gallery in Chicago, IL and de boer in Los Angeles, CA.
