Art by City: New York — Zack Zublena, North American Artist Featured by Singulart
Singulart has selected Zack Zublena among its curated North American Artists to Follow.
The French artist and fine art photographer brings a distinctive visual language built around gold, light, movement and the human figure.
Based in Los Angeles, Zublena works at the intersection of fine art photography, performance and contemporary sculpture. For New York, the city that turned photography into a museum art, his golden figures enter a conversation that has been unfolding here for nearly a century.
Golden Yoga Prayer explores the human body as a sculptural and contemplative form. The golden figure is transformed by light, creating an image that exists somewhere between photography, sculpture and symbolic portraiture.
In a New York interior, from a Tribeca loft with cast-iron columns to an Upper East Side townhouse, the work becomes a point of stillness within the energy of the city: an artwork, a sculptural presence and a quiet visual anchor.
Our Curation of North American Artists to Follow
Discover Zack Zublena featured by Singulart alongside selected contemporary artists from North America.
New York: The Capital of the Contemporary Art Conversation
New York is one of the world's great centers of contemporary art, photography and visual culture. From the galleries of Chelsea and the Lower East Side to the museums of Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile, the city has brought together artists working across photography, sculpture, performance and new forms of expression for generations.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum shape a cultural landscape in which photography, painting and sculpture are in constant dialogue, a dialogue followed closely by the arts pages of The New York Times.
Within this wider North American art landscape, Singulart's selection of Zack Zublena highlights a practice that connects photography with the physicality of sculpture and performance.
MoMA founded one of the first museum departments devoted to photography in 1940. Today, from the galleries of Chelsea to the Whitney in the Meatpacking District and the International Center of Photography on the Lower East Side, New York offers a natural context for Zack Zublena's hybrid language of photography, performance and sculptural form.
Gold as a Visual Language
Gold is one of the defining elements of Zack Zublena's artistic vocabulary. Throughout art history, gold has been associated with light, value, power, spirituality and the timeless, from the gilded panels in the Met's medieval galleries to the gold leaf of Byzantine icons.
Zublena brings these historical associations into contemporary fine art photography by applying reflective gold directly to the human figure. Skin becomes reflective, movement becomes sculptural and the body appears to move beyond ordinary representation.
In New York, where light falls in long shafts between towers and pours through the tall windows of SoHo and Tribeca lofts, gold behaves like a mirror for the city itself: it catches light, holds it and returns it to the room.
From Bowing to Freedom: Performance and Sculpture
In Silent Power: The Bowing Shadow in Gold, the body becomes an instrument for expressing an idea rather than an identity.
The gesture of bowing can suggest submission, respect, introspection or surrender. Yet within Zublena's wider visual language, physical restraint can also become a metaphor for freedom. This ambiguity gives the work its power: a single gesture holds several meanings, and the viewer takes part in the interpretation.
New York knows this territory well. From the Judson Dance Theater in Greenwich Village to the stages of Broadway and the performance programs of MoMA and the Whitney, the city has long treated the body itself as a medium of art.
The Bow Is Mine answers the same gesture from another angle. Folded into himself, the golden male figure turns a bow into an act of ownership rather than submission: a moment of inner strength, chosen and held. Light gathers along the spine and shoulders, and the body becomes a single sculptural curve.
Golden Yoga Duo expands Zublena's exploration of the human body through the relationship between two golden figures.
The poses create a visual balance between stillness and movement. Yoga introduces a vocabulary of concentration, balance and inner movement, qualities that feel especially precious in a city that never stops.
With the Golden Male & Female Diptych, the dialogue between two figures becomes a dialogue between the masculine and the feminine. Hung side by side on a gallery-white wall, the two panels answer each other: strength and grace, line and curve, two presences that are complete on their own and even stronger together.
From the Human Figure to the Cosmic
In Supernova / Genesis / Before the First Leaf, the relationship between the human figure and the cosmic becomes particularly pronounced.
The title suggests origins, expansion and the emergence of life. The golden figure can be read simultaneously as a human body and as something larger: a fragment of a celestial landscape, a symbolic form emerging from darkness.
New Yorkers know this sense of scale. Beneath the dome of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, or looking up at the night sky above the Manhattan skyline, the human figure meets the vastness of the universe. Here, the body becomes a point of departure for imagining another state of being.
Axis of Freedom — Golden Balance extends this exploration through a triptych composition in which balance, symmetry and bodily control become central visual elements.
Presented on a long loft wall or in a hotel lobby, the triptych creates a visual rhythm that changes with the viewer's position. The three photographic moments function almost like a contemporary sequence of movement frozen in space.
After movement comes stillness. In Sacred Devotion, a single golden figure gathers into a pose of quiet devotion, hands joined, body still. It is the most intimate image of the series: a pilgrim at rest, holding light rather than reflecting it, and a calm, contemplative presence for a Manhattan bedroom, a private library or a quiet corner above the city.
Zack Zublena: Fine Art Photography in the New York Landscape
New York has treated photography as a serious art form longer than almost any city in the world, from Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 on Fifth Avenue to MoMA's pioneering photography department and today's museum programs.
For photography collectors, the city also offers institutions dedicated entirely to the medium: the International Center of Photography, the Aperture Foundation and the Chelsea and Upper East Side galleries where photographic prints are collected as fine art rather than commercial imagery.
Zublena's work enters this conversation from a distinctive position. His photographs begin with the physical body, but the final image is constructed through performance, gold body paint, sculptural lighting and careful composition. Rooted in Fine Art Photography Los Angeles and created as Exclusive Art for Los Angeles Interiors, his work now finds a natural place in New York residences, galleries and hotels.
New York is also home to established photography galleries such as Howard Greenberg Gallery and Edwynn Houk Gallery, reinforcing the city's long-standing relationship with fine art photography and collectible photographic prints.
Zack Zublena and the New York Art Experience
In New York, art lives everywhere: in museums and galleries, but also in hotel lobbies, private residences, restaurants and the lofts of SoHo and Tribeca. An artwork can move naturally between a private collection, a boutique hotel, a wellness space and a gallery wall.
This fluidity is central to Zack Zublena's practice. His gold figures can appear monumental and intimate at the same time, making them particularly suited to contemporary interiors and architectural environments, from a Fifth Avenue apartment to a Brooklyn waterfront residence.
For New York collectors, the work offers another way of experiencing photography: not simply as an image on a wall, but as a luminous physical presence within a space.
Read Zack Zublena's Singulart Feature
Discover the Singulart selection and explore Zack Zublena alongside contemporary artists selected from the North American art scene.
Zack Zublena — French Artist & Fine Art Photographer · Los Angeles
