Chechu Álava’s ongoing series of female portraits reclaim the male gaze and challenge the archetype and hierarchy presented by the male artist/female muse relationship. The starting points of Álava’s works are often reinterpretations of recognisable art historical works by male artists, photography, and historic moments of gender hierarchy. A gauzy, auratic atmosphere is often offset by the directness of the subject’s gaze.
Álava’s portraits teeter on the edge of ghostliness amplified and unified by her soft-focus application of a palette of fleshy, pearlescent pinks and postmodern pastels. Offering up something of the otherworldly and strangely erotic, Álava’s paintings combine sex and spirit to conjure the creamy, dreamy, transubstantiated flesh of saints, angels and gods in the frescoes of cathedrals. Moody and existential they are imbued with a muted tenor of unspoken intensity common to many humans who currently identify as women, whilst celebrating the shared and common positionality of womanhood across the veil of time.
Chechu Álava (b. 1973 Asturias, Spain. Lives and works in Paris, France) has had solo exhibitions at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, Spain; Meghan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles US; Cob Gallery, London, UK; Xippas Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland and Paris, France; Galería Alegría, Barcelona, Spain; Bravin Lee programs, New York, US. Álava has featured in group exhibitions at Lychee One Gallery, London, UK; , Museo Barjola, Gijón, Asturias, Spain; Smac Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; Instituto Cervantes, Rome, Italy and Beers Contemporary Gallery, London, UK.
In 2020, Álava presented her first major museum exhibition, Rebeldes, at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, Spain, which was accompanied by an artist’s monograph. Álava’s work is represented in institutions such as the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, DKV Art Collection Spain, the Ministry of Culture (Spain) and in private collections in Mexico, France, Colombia, Germany, Portugal, the United States, South Africa, South Korea, China, Italy and Spain. In 2014, her work was selected by an international jury to be included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, a book published by Thames and Hudson.
Written June 2026