Zack Zublena Selected by Singulart: A North American Artist to Follow in Chicago
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 Chicago, the city of great architecture, the Gold Coast and a photography tradition that shaped modern art, Singulart's selection introduces golden figures made for its interiors.
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 Chicago interior, from a Gold Coast greystone to a Streeterville high-rise overlooking Lake Michigan or a West Loop loft, the work becomes a point of stillness and warmth 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.
Chicago: A Great American Capital of Art, Architecture and Photography
Chicago is one of the great centers of art, architecture and visual culture in North America. From the galleries of the West Loop and River North to the museums along Michigan Avenue and the lakefront, the city brings together collectors, artists, architects and designers who appreciate work of real substance.
The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago shape a cultural landscape in which photography, painting and sculpture are in constant dialogue. Each spring, EXPO CHICAGO brings international galleries to Navy Pier, a season followed closely by the arts pages of the Chicago Tribune.
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.
In Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate turns the human body and the skyline into a reflection on a polished sculptural surface, a dialogue between body, light and form that Chicagoans know by heart. From the Art Institute of Chicago to the MCA in Streeterville and the galleries of the West Loop, Chicago 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. Chicago knows its gold well: the glittering mosaics and Tiffany glass dome of the Chicago Cultural Center, the gold-leaf crown of the Art Deco Carbide & Carbon Building on Michigan Avenue, and the Gold Coast itself.
Zublena brings these 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 Chicago, where the light changes from the bright blue of a summer day on Lake Michigan to the low, golden sun of a winter afternoon between the towers, gold brings warmth into the room: it catches light, holds it and returns it as radiance, whatever the season.
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.
Chicago knows this territory well. From The Joffrey Ballet at the Lyric Opera House to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and the stages of Steppenwolf, the city has long celebrated the body in movement as a form 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 Chicagoans embrace on summer mornings along the Lakefront Trail or on the lawns of Millennium Park.
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 wall facing the lake, 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.
Chicagoans know this sense of scale. The Adler Planetarium, America's first planetarium, opened on the lakefront in 1930, and generations have looked up at the stars from its dome on Northerly Island. Here, the human figure meets the vastness of the universe, and 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 wall in a River North loft or in the lobby of a Michigan Avenue hotel, 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 Lincoln Park bedroom, a private library or a quiet room on a snowy Chicago evening.
Zack Zublena: Fine Art Photography in the Chicago Landscape
Chicago holds a defining place in the history of photography. In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus here, and its Institute of Design became a school of modern photography through Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. The city's streets were also the subject of Vivian Maier, whose photographs are now celebrated worldwide.
For photography collectors, the city offers remarkable spaces dedicated to the medium, from the photography collection of the Art Institute of Chicago to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, where photographic prints are treated as collectible 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 featured by Singulart, finds a natural place in Chicago residences, galleries and hotels.
Chicago is also home to Catherine Edelman Gallery in the West Loop, dedicated to contemporary photography since 1987, and to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, reinforcing the city's long-standing relationship with fine art photography and collectible photographic prints.
Zack Zublena and the Chicago Art Experience
In Chicago, art lives everywhere: in museums and galleries, but also in hotel lobbies, private residences, restaurants in the West Loop, corporate towers in the Loop and North Shore homes from Winnetka to Lake Forest. 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 to the city where the skyscraper was born: from a Gold Coast residence to a Streeterville penthouse or a hotel on the Magnificent Mile.
For Chicago 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
