Chechu Álava: Circus of Life

Megan Mulrooney is thrilled to present Circus of Life, our first exhibition with the Spanish painter Chechu Álava. The exhibition comprises a suite of new paintings on linen and will be on view in Los Angeles from May 10 – June 28.

In Circus of Life, Chechu Álava draws from the quiet drama of everyday life, where personal and global histories fold into one another like layers of thinned oil on linen. Inspired by Shakespeare’s enduring metaphor “All the world's a stage,” Álava imagines life as an unfolding pageant of masks, trials, and transformations. Across portraits, dreamlike tableaus, and spectral scenes, the exhibition traces a passage from childhood through the dramas of love, the search for meaning, and the inevitability of death, casting each phase with a delicate, spiritual charge.

The paintings offer archetypes rather than narratives: the funambulist in search of balance; the masked figures revealing the etymology of “person” as a role to be played; the painter herself, standing in timeless devotion to the act of creation. Figures emerge from behind red curtains, disappear into reflection, or recline between movements in a silent interlude. Death appears too, not as rupture, but as part of the eternal turning of life’s wheel.

Álava’s brushwork intensifies the effect: quasi-translucent layers of oil blur the line between presence and absence, figuration and abstraction. The paintings seem to hum at the edge of visibility, evoking the postures of Velázquez’s Meninas, the quiet defiance of Balthus’s sitters, and the spiritual saturation of Rothko’s fields. Yet Álava's voice remains unmistakably her own - intimate, searching, and luminous with a kind of everyday mysticism.

In Álava’s smallest works, theatrical prosceniums frame fragmentary scenes: a child at play, a figure in prayer, an opera-like tableau of love and loss. Here too, Álava suggests that all stages are connected -- from the smallest domestic dramas to the great movements of history -- in the endless, weightless performance that is the circus of life.

Chechu Álava (b. 1973, Asturias, ES; lives and works in Paris, FR) studied at the University of Salamanca and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Cob Gallery, London, UK; Galería Alegría, Barcelona, ES; and Galerie Xippas, Geneva, CH, among others. In 2020, The Thyssen Bornemisza Museum in Madrid presented her solo exhibition Rebeldes, accompanied by the publication of a monograph. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Wilder Gallery, London, UK; Zoo Galerie, Nantes, FR; the Museo Fundación Juan March, Palma de Mallorca, ES; the Lazaro Galdiano Museum, Madrid, ES; and the Cerventes Institute, Rome, IT; among others. Álava has received fellowships from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Colegio de España in Paris. Her work is held in the public collections of the Fine Arts Museum of Asturias; the Spanish Ministry of Culture; the Government of the Principality of Asturias, the Government of Castilla y León, the DKV Foundation, ES; as well as in private collections in Colombia, Mexico, Germany, Portugal, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, South Africa, China, South Korea, and Spain. In 2014, her work was selected by an international jury to be included in the catalogue 100 Painters of Tomorrow, published by Thames and Hudson.