“I like troubled women,” Noelia Towers 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–like focus on each subject.
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: “I need to make what comes out of me and what I really want to make,” she told Artsy.
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’s likeness isn’t legible in her paintings, her psyche is, via the personal experiences of femininity, trauma, and other charged memories that her work considers.
What makes Towers’s practice so vital is the way she refuses patronizing narratives of womanhood, instead using images to create space for agency and complexity. “I see men making paintings about these things all the time, and they’re just sexualizing things they haven’t lived through,” Towers stated emphatically. Hers is a much-needed voice, creating a potent visual language for representing women’s interiority—raw, nebulous, and volatile.
A penchant for self-expression has always run deep in Towers, who started making art during her childhood in Spain. “I was a very social kid, but I needed something that I wasn’t getting from normal child things,” she noted, reflecting on her early desire for a serious creative outlet.
To meet that need, Towers’s 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—a relationship that’s apparent in her works’ unflinching exploration of self.
Towers turned away from visual art as she grew up, instead diving into the hardcore music scene in Barcelona: “As a teenager, I was like, ‘I’m a punk now, and I’m gonna start a band that’s gonna be my life,’” she deadpanned. Aside from her early experiences with art therapy, Towers’s institutional training is limited to her bachillerato—a two-year post-secondary program in the Spanish education system with specialized tracks, including art. Needing to work to support herself, she wasn’t able to pursue higher education in the arts.
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.
Just because you shouldn’t doesn’t mean you can’t (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.
With increased time at home during the pandemic, Towers’s 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 “Killer Cute,” a well-received group show at Los Angeles gallery de boer 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.
Noelia Towers, Waiting For You to Come Home, 2021. Photo by Jacob Phillip. Courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles & Antwerp.
Towers’s interest in the abject and in troubled women relates to another inspiration for her practice: film. “I love movies that depict brutality in a way where you can’t look away,” Towers professed. In particular, she’s moved by films that portray the complex, beautiful, and severe reality of women’s lived experiences, such as the work of Chantal Akerman and Catherine Breillat.
This love underpins the cinematic quality of her work, as seen in Skinned Knee(2025), which she showed in a solo show 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’s surroundings in a bokeh-like blur, imitates the work of a camera. Cinephiles may note echoes in the composition of a scene from Breillat’s Une vraie jeune fille (1976), in which the young protagonist rides an old red bike around the Landes Forest.
Towers is showing in a dual presentation with one of her artistic idols, the late feminist avant-gardist Birgit Jürgenssen, at Slip House in New York this fall, and she’s excited about the direction her work is taking. She typically paints quickly—necessary to keep up with the powerful images her mind generates—but recently, she has been experimenting with relaxing her hand even further, taking a looser approach to leave evidence of her brushstrokes without sacrificing detail.
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: “It’s all about this world-building experiment,” she said. “Curiosity keeps me going.”
The Artsy Vanguard 2026
The Artsy Vanguard is now in its eighth year of highlighting the most promising artists working today. As 2026 approaches, we’re celebrating 10 talents poised to become future leaders of contemporary art and culture.
Explore more of The Artsy Vanguard 2026 and browse works by the artists.
Video by Pushpin Films / Nathan Lynch for Artsy.
Thumbnail: Portrait of Noelia Towers by Nathan Lynch for Artsy, 2025; Noelia Towers, from left to right: “Remember Me,” 2021. Courtesy of the artist and de boer; Beautifully Handcuffed Bride,” 2023. Courtesy of the artist and PM/AM.
