Artist Nieves González wants you to go out and steal horses with your friends

In one painting by Nieves González, two women dressed in pink and emerald fur coats tenderly cradle each other’s decapitated heads, which appear to be peacefully sleeping. This sort of imagery is a motif for the Spanish painter, evoking a kind of Christian martyr known as a cephalophore, often thought to have preached after decapitation. In González’s version, however, what could be unsettling becomes a testament to mutual support. “Instead of a martyr carrying her own severed head, the two women carry each other’s heads, showing that we are there to carry each other’s weight no matter what happens,” González tells Bazaar.

The oil painting, titled Something’s Crossed Over Me, and I Can’t Go Back, is among many regal portraits of feminine bonds at the centre of “A Friendship Story,” González’s current solo show, up at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles through July 25. The exhibition is filled with women, some holding each other’s heads, others mounted on horses, and many firmly embracing each other. What ties these paintings together is the romantic details revealing the artist’s adoration for her subjects. “This body of work is an intimate exploration of sisterhood and deep connection, honouring an invisible lineage of women who share a silent, wordless understanding,” she explains.

Something’s Crossed Over in Me and I Can’t Go Back (2026)

González, born in 1996 in Huelva, Spain, and currently based in Grenada, became an overnight sensation when Lily Allen unveiled the cover art for West End Girl in October 2025. Allen discovered the painter via Instagram and tapped her to create the instantly iconic cover art, which features the British singer in a stately pose wearing a polka-dotted baby-blue puffer jacket. (The original painting, West End Girl (Lily Allen), now lives in the National Portrait Gallery.) While this project may have put González on the map, she’s been honing her modern twist on baroque portraiture for years.

González’s first exposure to portraiture was via Spanish masters such as Jusepe de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Diego Velázquez. These baroque artists channelled an alluring “devotional darkness,” as González calls it. But she resented that they often reduced women to one-dimensional narrative devices.

“I started really committing to portraiture once I noticed how much of that inherited canon had cast women as saints or muses—present, venerated even, but never agents,” she says. “Portraiture became the place where I could correct that: paint women not as symbols of something else but as people who hold knowledge, competence, history.” González began painting the women around her, stoically poised and often adorned in modern fashion.

Nieves González’s “For Each Other” series at Richard Heller Gallery

Intent on subverting art history, González also reappropriates canonical equestrian portraiture (think Jacques-Louis David’s 1801 portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon Crossing the Alps) to grant her subjects a sense of power they would once be denied. Her work The Runaway I (2026) features two women—one in a pink leather trench coat and another in a green puffer and leopard-print skirt—riding on a rearing black stallion.

“Regal and equestrian portraiture has always been a way of telling you who governs—scale, posture, the command of an animal that’s supposed to be untamed,” she says. “I keep that entire vocabulary intact, but I hand it to friendship of women instead of sovereignty: Amazons who govern, hunt, and trust each other completely, riding a horse that’s still wild rather than tamed for ceremony.”

While González’s compositions recall the past, most of her subjects—often real women from her life—wear contemporary clothing, such as the puffer jacket in her Lily Allen portrait. “Instead of dressing these women in anything ceremonial, I’ll put them in something completely ordinary,” she says.

Holding You (2026), for instance, shows two women embracing in pink leather trench coats; her three “For Each Other” paintings each feature a pair of women donning colourful, voluminous puffers. “The friction between a regal pose and an unremarkable garment is the whole argument: This kind of grandeur doesn’t need a crown; it can live in whatever a friend actually happens to be wearing that day.”

Nieves González’s Go Out and Steal Horses (2026)

What González successfully nurtures, above all, is a true sense of kinship between herself and the women she paints. This is why the embrace holds so much importance in “A Friendship Story,” because it’s “a universal symbol of companionship, solace, and support.” But there is also an inherent playfulness and freedom within this female camaraderie.

“I’d love for someone to walk out of the gallery wanting to go steal horses with their own friends. [I’m half joking but meaning it completely,” González says. “Underneath that, I want them to feel the tenderness, the sheer seriousness of care itself.”

This article officially appeared on harperbazaar.com

Lead image: Alan Shaffer Photography

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