Skarstedt's Chelsea space in New York is presenting Jaque Mate, a new solo exhibition of paintings by Cristina BanBan. The show, whose title is the Spanish term for checkmate, opened on 10 September 2026 and continues through 31 October at 547 West 25th Street. The paintings extend BanBan's long-running investigation of the female form, but shift the emphasis. Where earlier bodies of work treated the body as a vessel for memory and emotion, the new canvases present it as a permeable entity, constantly reshaped by closeness to others — much as every move in chess repositions the whole board. Gestures, leans and points of contact between figures send change rippling through the composition, and the attention moves to the charged space where one body meets another. The Barcelona-born, Brooklyn-based painter (born 1987) has become one of the most closely watched figurative painters of her generation. She began drawing from live models as a child in Barcelona, earned her BFA at the University of Barcelona, and moved to London in 2012 before settling in New York. After early shows with 1969 Gallery and Albertz Benda, she joined both Perrotin and Skarstedt in 2022; her debut Paris show with Perrotin sold out within days. Her market has moved quickly too: a 2019 canvas set an auction record of £138,600 at Phillips London, nearly seven times its estimate. Large in scale, gestural and built up in fields of saturated colour, the new works keep BanBan's signature voluptuous bodies and oversized hands and eyes, but arrange them into what the gallery describes as declarative, victorious compositions — bodies that hold the space rather than asking for it. It is her latest statement in a practice she has repeatedly described as a kind of journal, filtering daily experience through paint.