portrait

Spanish painter Nieves González arrives in Los Angeles for her first U.S. solo exhibition having already experienced a taste of fame.

The 29-year-old caught the attention of the art and fashion worlds last year after being discovered on Instagram and commissioned to paint the cover of Lily Allen’s album “West End Girl.” Depicting the singer as a Baroque aristocrat clad in contemporary designer fashion, the portrait helped propel González onto an international stage.

Collectors have taken notice. The 13 paintings in “A Friendship Story,” opening Saturday at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, have already sold out, according to the gallery, with prices ranging from $4,000 to $20,000.

• Share via Close extra sharing options

Elle magazine dubbed González “Fashion’s Favorite New Artist,” while exhibitions in Rome, Paris, Belfast and Bilbao, Spain, expanded her reputation across Europe.

González developed her classic yet defiantly modern approach while studying at the University of Seville, where Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán painted in the naturalist Baroque tradition. Drawing liberally from fashion, art history and everyday life, she often dresses the subjects of her portraits in puffer jackets — garments she wears herself during the cold winters of Granada, Spain, where she lives. The material, she said, recalls the sculptural rendering of fabric in paintings by Zurbarán and Velázquez: the folds, the volumes, the high shine.

Nieves González often dresses her subjects in puffer jackets.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“It works beautifully from a visual standpoint,” she said, speaking Spanish during an interview at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station a few days before the exhibition opened. Wearing blue jeans and a pink button-down blouse, she echoed the pastel blues and pinks that appear throughout many of the works surrounding her.

“Fashion inspires me,” she said. “Just as 17th century artists drew inspiration from the fashion of their day — often creating paintings that served as catalogs of current styles — I do the same,” she said. “The goal is to not merely convey a specific message or ideology but to create a testament to a generation and the era in which we live.”

This fall, González’s painting “La Sfida” (2025) will appear in the Städel Museum’s exhibition “Mary Magdalene. Sin. Pray. Love” in Frankfurt, Germany, alongside works by Lady Gaga, Marlene Dumas and Auguste Rodin. The painting depicts Mary Magdalene with long, flowing hair, draped in a regal red garment and clutching a skull — a contemporary interpretation of one of Christianity’s most enduring figures.

“Nieves González is the youngest of these artists and, at the same time, probably the one who most closely follows in the tradition of the Old Masters,” curators Bastian Eclercy and Stefan Roller wrote in an email.

The Santa Monica exhibition marks an evolution from the paintings that established González’s reputation. Earlier works often centered on solitary women posed with the self-possession of royal portraits or religious icons. “A Friendship Story” focuses on relationships between pairs of women, exploring friendship, intimacy, support and shared experience.

For González, friendship is one of the most profound aspects of women’s lives and a subject she felt deserved greater attention in painting.

Victoria Rios, a curator who works with González, said the artist’s paintings “rewrite the narratives of the past, rewrite the history of martyrdom and place women at the center.”

“Nothing in her painting is arbitrary,” Rios said in an email. “Every formal decision is also an ethical one.”

“The horse elevates the art; symbolically, it carries connotations of elegance and nobility,” Nieves González said. “It seemed like a way to elevate the concept of friendship.”

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

González frequently turns art historical conventions on their head. In “Salir a robar caballos: Go out to steal horses,” she replaces the archetypal portrait of a gallant man on horseback with two young women dressed in puffer and vinyl jackets, posed like contemporary Amazons atop rearing horses.

“The horse elevates the art; symbolically, it carries connotations of elegance and nobility,” González said. “It seemed like a way to elevate the concept of friendship. It also has an element of play, adventure and fun, since having fun is part of the bond too.”

The artist also sees her work through a feminist lens.

“We live in a patriarchal society, and so, unfortunately, I belong to the oppressed segment of that society, and my work relates to that,” she said. “It stems from a struggle, an understanding and a process of redefining concepts that we have historically established as normal, natural and habitual.”

“I am interested in portraying us as brave and powerful, sometimes even with an air of haughtiness,” she said.

Another painting, “Something’s crossed over me and I can’t go back” (2026), captures González’s fusion of historical and contemporary references. Two women dressed in green and pink fur cradle each other’s heads, reimagining medieval depictions of cephalophores — Christian martyrs who carry their severed heads while continuing to preach or pray.

The title comes from a pivotal line in the 1991 film “Thelma & Louise,” marking the turning point for Geena Davis’ character Thelma, fully committing to her ultimately fatal adventure with Susan Sarandon’s Louise.

Nieves González, “Holding You,” 2026 (oil on canvas).

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

González builds each painting from what she calls a “Frankenstein” — a digital composite assembled from archival photographs, found images and reference material. The painting process then takes over. A mid-project visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid, for instance, might send her back to the digital sketch to pull in a compositional element from Velázquez before returning to the canvas. “The final result often ends up being completely different from what I initially envisioned,” she said.

Heller began representing González, whom he calls an “original voice,” last year after being introduced to her work by another painter.

Staging her first U.S. solo exhibition in Los Angeles rather than New York reflects what he sees as a more relaxed environment for an emerging artist, without the glare and expectations of the New York art world.

“L.A. feels a little less constrained,” Heller said. “It feels a little more free.”

González’s portrait of Allen is currently on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery, hanging in the same room as a self-portrait by David Hockney. She said while it “has been very significant in terms of media exposure,” exhibitions and professional opportunities were already in motion before the album cover brought wider attention.

“I’ve always said that what I want to do in life is make a living from painting,” she said.

Mission accomplished.

David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, has died.

He was 88.

Calling himself “an English Los Angeleno,” Hockney immortalized the city’s sparkling swimming pools, palm trees and beautiful young men, then went on to experiment with intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings and more.

Since his Pop Art paintings in the early ‘60s at London’s Royal College of Art, Hockney was rarely out of the limelight and, more important, rarely out of fresh ideas for how to draw, paint, film, print, photograph or otherwise express his creativity. The David Hockney Foundation owns more than 8,000 of his works, including about 200 sketchbooks, more than 230 self-portraits, opera designs and portraits of family and friends.

Hockney loved Hollywood — the people and the place — and liked to say he was brought up in England and Hollywood because of the time he spent at the movies. His peroxide blonde hair reportedly was inspired when he was a student and saw Clairol TV ads claiming “blondes have more fun.” But it was his interest in everything from Elvis Presley to the Hubble Space Telescope and his sense of humor that set him apart. Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called him “the Cole Porter of modern art.”

He was open about being gay, even when homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. His early love affair with artist Peter Schlesinger, a younger man he met when teaching a summer drawing class at UCLA in 1966, inspired Hockney’s monumental 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” a centerpiece of Jack Hazan’s 1974 film “A Bigger Splash.” The painting’s 2018 auction at Christie’s drew a record $90 million for a living artist.

He was a dedicated reader and student of art, paying homage in his work to Picasso and Cubism as well as to Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh and Cezanne. A lover of opera, he often had it playing loudly in the studio and enjoyed taking visitors on curated car trips through the Hollywood Hills or Malibu while listening to Wagner. He designed sets for major companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London and elsewhere over the years, and some of his set models were later shown in museums.

David Hockney’s work “Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4)” is part of his solo exhibition “David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed” at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs. (Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)

(Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)

His solo shows drew enormous crowds to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as early as 1988. In 2017 a major retrospective of his work, keyed to his 80^th birthday, was presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paris’ Centre Pompidou and London’s Tate Modern. Chronicling Hockney’s arrival as an important artist in the “ravishing” Met retrospective, the New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott called it “a revelation.” It was, she wrote, “a retort to all the eye-rollers,” including herself, who dismissed his work “as, at best, a guilty pleasure.”

In 2012 he received the coveted Order of Merit, which Queen Elizabeth II presented to him at Buckingham Palace.

David Hockney was born the fourth of five children to a working-class family in Bradford, Yorkshire, on July 9, 1937. He has said he started “making marks on paper” at 8 and received private painting lessons before moving on to Bradford School of Art in 1953. The first painting he sold was a portrait of his father in 1955. He attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 until his graduation in 1962 and received the school’s Gold Medal.

After college he did not slack off, noted his biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. In his 2014 book, “Hockney: The Biography,” Sykes pointed out that the artist’s first flat had a chest of drawers near the bed on which he had painted, in large capital letters, the words “get up and work immediately.”

David Hockney in 2017.

(Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul.)

Hockney lived by that command for the rest of his life, turning out canvas after canvas, photo after photo. In the ‘80s came his extraordinary multi-image photographic collages of friends including writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy and such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Canyon and Pearblossom Highway.

“The Polaroids started oddly enough when I’d just finished a long period of work in the theater, which is of course playing with perspective and illusion,” he once told The Times. “People say, ‘You are a painter, and photography is a sideline.’ But nothing is a sideline for me.”

That included his continuing fascination with technology. The artist’s long career swept in artworks made not only on cameras and canvases, but on such things as fax machines and photocopiers. Hockney liked to experiment, whether it was with state-of-the-art printing devices or centuries old painting techniques. He went several times to a show of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres at London’s National Gallery in 1999 and was greatly taken with the photographic’ quality of Ingres’ 19th century drawings. Certain that Ingres had used something optical to achieve that quality, Hockney bought himself a camera lucida, a small device that works like a prism. He then applied Ingres’ methods–as Hockney imagined them–to his own portraits of friends and family, and in 2001, he published “Secret Knowledge,” exploring his theories on early artistic uses of optical devices.

His death was confirmed by the Associated Press and New York Times.

Isenberg is a former Times staff writer

The “Coachella of books” has arrived. The biggest literary event in the country, the L.A. Times Festival of Books, kicked off at USC this weekend. The 31st annual event features more than 500 authors, including Lionel Richie, Tina Knowles, Larry David, Pat Benatar, Amy Tan, Anne Lamott and more. Several of these talented individuals stopped by the L.A. Times photo studio to have their portraits taken between spirited panel discussions and book signings.

Here are some portrait highlights from the 2026 Festival of Books:

Lisa Rinna author of “You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It.”

Morgan Hutchinson and Brett Hutchinson.

Daniel Humme and Roda Ahmed.

Rachel Renee Russell, Presli Noelle James, Kim James, Nikki Russell and Cori James.

Chet’la Sebree 2026 finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in Poetry for her collection “Blue Opening.”

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.