Spanish-born artist Noelia Towers has been selected for the prestigious Artsy Vanguard 2026, recognizing her as one of ten promising talents poised to become future leaders in contemporary art. Working from her Chicago apartment that doubles as her studio, Towers has gained recognition for her provocative paintings that explore themes of femininity, trauma, and power through what she calls her fascination with "troubled women."
Towers' distinctive artistic style features women with often obscured faces in ominous, dreamlike scenes. Her paintings depict subjects crawling up darkened staircases, taking long drags from cigarettes, or perching precariously on polished banisters. Using a subdued color palette and tunnel vision-like focus, she creates compositions that blur the line between reality and hallucination. "I need to make what comes out of me and what I really want to make," Towers explained, emphasizing the autobiographical nature of her work.
The artist frequently uses herself as a model, staging and photographing scenes that she later translates into paintings. This intimate approach allows her to infuse her work with personal experiences of womanhood and charged memories. Towers deliberately challenges patronizing narratives about women, stating emphatically, "I see men making paintings about these things all the time, and they're just sexualizing things they haven't lived through." Her work creates space for female agency and complexity, offering what critics describe as a much-needed voice in contemporary art.
Towers' artistic journey began during her childhood in Barcelona, Spain, where her mother enrolled her in a grassroots organization providing arts education and therapy to underprivileged students. This early connection between art and therapy remains evident in her unflinching exploration of self. "I was a very social kid, but I needed something that I wasn't getting from normal child things," she reflected on her early desire for serious creative expression.
As a teenager, Towers temporarily abandoned visual art for Barcelona's hardcore music scene, joking, "I was like, I'm a punk now, and I'm gonna start a band that's gonna be my life." Her formal art education was limited to the bachillerato, a two-year post-secondary program in Spain's education system. Unable to pursue higher education in the arts due to financial constraints, she worked to support herself until moving to Chicago in 2014 with her partner, a musician she met in Barcelona's music scene.
With her partner's support, Towers' painting practice reemerged in Chicago, where she quickly found an audience. She participated in group exhibitions at Woman Made Gallery in 2018 and Public Works Gallery in 2019, already displaying the photorealistic style and hypnagogic atmosphere that would define her work. Her piece "Just because you shouldn't doesn't mean you can't" (2019), first shown at Public Works Gallery, exemplifies her distinctive approach, depicting the artist gagged and handcuffed at a table with a plate of garlic, subverting eroticism through mundane domestic setting.
The pandemic period proved particularly productive for Towers, allowing her to expand themes of violence, self-preservation, and power dynamics while remaining grounded in domestic settings. Her work "Waiting for you to come home" (2021), featured in the group show "Killer Cute" at Los Angeles gallery de boer, demonstrates this evolution. The painting shows a woman from behind wearing a meticulously painted black leather trench coat, concealing scissors while leaning against a door, positioning her in power over whoever might enter.
Towers draws significant inspiration from cinema, particularly films by directors Chantal Akerman and Catherine Breillat that portray complex realities of women's experiences. "I love movies that depict brutality in a way where you can't look away," she professed. This cinematic influence is evident in works like "Skinned Knee" (2025), shown in her solo exhibition at de boer earlier this year, which features a close-cropped view of a bruised, bloody knee of a young woman on a red bicycle, with shallow focus creating a camera-like bokeh effect.
Currently, Towers is participating in a dual presentation with late feminist avant-gardist Birgit Jürgenssen at Slip House in New York this fall. She continues to experiment with her technique, recently adopting a looser brushstroke approach while maintaining her characteristic detail and photorealistic quality. Towers typically paints quickly to keep pace with the powerful images her mind generates, but she's now exploring ways to relax her hand further while preserving the intensity of her vision.
The Artsy Vanguard, now in its eighth year, highlights the most promising artists working today as the art world looks toward 2026. With her ideas multiplying as rapidly as her exhibitions, Towers sees endless facets of herself to explore and human complexities to interrogate. "It's all about this world-building experiment," she explained. "Curiosity keeps me going." Her commitment to this artistic inquiry represents what she views as a lifelong endeavor to create a potent visual language for representing women's interiority in all its raw, nebulous, and volatile complexity.
