West, London
Chechu Álava
The Secret Garden
Cob Gallery“The spring is blowing in through the open door; the lilacs are breaking into bud. I dig in the garden, and find it suits my mind… I feel more peaceful than for weeks.” —Virginia Woolf Cob Gallery is pleased to present The Secret Garden, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Spanish artist Chechu Álava. Álava has long been recognised for her painterly language that reimagines how women have been represented, remembered, and erased throughout the history of art. Based in Paris since 2001, she developed a practice rooted in portraiture, where figures drawn from art, literature, and cultural memory emerge through delicate veils of oil paint, suspended between apparition and presence. In the early 2000s she found herself in a contemporary art world dominated by conceptualism, where female voices were scarcely acknowledged. In response, she turned to the museums of Paris, immersing herself in the Old Masters while reframing female creativity through the lens of traditional painting. For Álava, the “secret garden” is an inner realm: a symbolic landscape where desire and loss, fragility and renewal coexist. As she writes, it is “an inner space… the secret depths of the soul. Desires, passions, shadows, sufferings and epiphanies. Its emotional climate is as changeable as nature itself.” Painting becomes her Álava’s of approaching this terrain, offering fleeting reflections of what cannot otherwise be spoken. Muted palettes, sfumato surfaces, and atmospheric blurring lend her works a dreamlike quality, while her subjects radiate psychological intensity. Their gaze, poise, and quiet defiance reclaim agency from the passive roles historically imposed on women. By collapsing temporal distance, Álava draws overlooked women; artists, writers, intellectuals into dialogue with canonical imagery, unsettling the authority of the male gaze. Earlier in 2025, Álava visited Charleston, the Sussex home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She was drawn to the garden, where colour and rhythm of growth conveyed a still-vivid atmosphere of female creativity. Following Cob Gallery’s relocation to Bloomsbury, this encounter deepened her connection to the Bloomsbury Group, figures who rejected Victorian constraints and carved new ways of living. Though not direct portraits, Álava’s paintings honour their spirit of rebellion, intimacy, and intellectual freedom. Álava often describes inspiration as becoming a channel emptying herself so that something larger might flow through. Her work pays tribute to women who opened doors before her, rebels of their time to whom she feels both grateful and indebted. She invokes the metaphor of the garden as a living painting: fertile, ever-changing, uniting art and life. In The Secret Garden, Álava’s figures are not portraits so much as presences: fragile yet insistent, ethereal yet enduring. They open onto inner landscapes where art, memory, and desire converge. Here, the garden is no longer Edenic, domestic, or ornamental. It is eternal: a metaphor for survival, mourning, creativity, and becoming. A place of radical intimacy and collective strength, where foremothers are remembered not as distant icons but as a living chorus offering resilience and hope.