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Nieves González painting in her studio in Granada, Spain.
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By Finbarr O’Reilly For The New York Times
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How a Pop Star’s Portrait Launched the Career of an Unknown Spanish Artist
Nieves González, a 29-year-old painter, once worked in relative obscurity in Andalusia. Her picture of the British singer Lily Allen changed that.
Nieves González painting in her studio in Granada, Spain.
Credit...
By Finbarr O’Reilly For The New York Times
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By
Jason Horowitz
Jason Horowitz spent a day with Ms. González in Granada, in southern Spain.
April 26, 2026
The shushing of brush strokes stopped as Nieves González, painting her latest Baroque-style portrait of a woman in a contemporary puffer jacket, paused to chitchat with a fellow artist in their studio in southern Spain.
“We’re always gossiping,” Ms. González, her green sweater splattered with paint and her face sparkling with nose studs, said with a laugh.
A good deal of the chatter in the Spanish art world lately, though, has been about Ms. González herself. Last year, the British singer Lily Allen plucked Ms. González, 29, out of the Instagram blue to paint her portrait for her latest album cover. The record, “West End Girl,”
became a hit
, and so did Ms. González, whom
the newspaper Artnet called “an overnight art sensation.”
Her image of Ms. Allen, outfitted in a polka-dot puffer jacket, has been viewed millions of times on Spotify, billboards, even on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night desk. In March,
the National Portrait Gallery in London unveiled the painting
, which will hang in the same room as a work by David Hockney, and called her “one of the most compelling voices in figurative painting today.”
“My dream,” said Ms. González as she rapidly colored in the crimson puffer coat in her latest work.
Those puffer jackets are typical of Ms. González’s work, which feature ethereal or biblical muses sitting regally in natural landscapes that evoke work by the old masters.
She typically subverts that centuries-old aesthetic by dressing her subjects with sumptuous pink, blue and white quilted jackets — and also imbuing them with more agency and main character energy.
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