In 1975 he held his first individual exhibition at the Buades gallery in Madrid. With the entry of the eighties, it moved away from the assumptions of its beginnings and connected with international movements such as Neo-Expressionism and Transavant-garde. In 1981 he was an artist in residence at P.S.1 in New York and participated in both the XVI Sao Paulo Biennial and the Salón de los 16, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid. In 1982 he participated in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and a year later he was invited to several exhibitions in Europe and the United States, highlighting the one called 'Recent European paintings' at the Salomon R. Guggenheim in New York. During that period he managed to show his work for the first time at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago. The 1980s continued with a series of solo shows in Seattle, Boston, Milan, Rome, Madrid, Bern, and Nagoya (Japan). It is worth highlighting the one held in 1987 at The Mezzanine Gallery, belonging to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the first of his individual exhibitions in 1988 at Charles Cowles Gallery, also in New York. Throughout the nineties he continued to exhibit with his American galleries and was a visiting professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the NY Art School in New York. He held numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, highlighting in Spain the one titled 'The Labyrinth of the Compass', developed in 1998 at the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art in Seville (CAAC) and presented the following year at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. . Another exhibition that transcended nationally was 'Salta a la vista', which collected works on paper from 1974 to 2001, without forgetting all those periodicals in his gallery in Madrid, the Antonio Machón Gallery. In 2009 he exhibited 'Out of Frame' at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (CAC) followed by a set of exhibitions in galleries and museums that included latent lines of research in his more than 40 years of work. He has recently exhibited in Barcelona 'Nothing to say' at the Miguel Marcos Gallery, and also the exhibition titled 'Ace in the hole' at the Juan Silió Gallery in Santander. Finally, in January 2018 he premiered the exhibition 'La vertu tue' made specifically for the Alliance Française of Malaga around a recurring theme in his work: the French Revolution. And in June 2018 he inaugurated the exhibition 'El Clamor de las Moscas' at the Cicus in Seville, a very personal journey through his work on paper from the beginning until now. He has just resumed his work with the Galeria Il Ponte Contemporanea in Rome where he has inaugurated the exhibition 'Exit Strategy: Via di Fuga' Chema Cobo starts from conceptual budgets and channels them through painting. In 2021, he inaugurated an exhibition at the Casa Brenan in Malaga titled 'In the kingdom of penumbras', where he recreates Brenan's universe in a series of large watercolors, following in the footsteps of the British Hispanist through his books. In parallel, he builds his books of aphorisms (Amnesia I and II) with which he nourishes his work and roots his entire universe of images, thoughts and written phrases.

Tarifa (Cádiz, 1952 - 2023)