Zack Zublena Selected by Singulart: A North American Artist to Follow in Aspen
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 Aspen, a mountain town where some of the world's most discerning collectors gather each season, Singulart's selection introduces golden figures made for its chalets, its light and its love of art.
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 an Aspen interior, from a Red Mountain residence facing Aspen Mountain to a West End Victorian or a Snowmass chalet, the work becomes a point of warmth and stillness within the mountain landscape: 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.
Aspen: A Mountain Town at the Heart of the Art World
Aspen holds a place in the art world far greater than its size. Each season, collectors, artists and gallerists from New York, Los Angeles and Europe meet in this small Colorado town, where internationally renowned galleries sit along the streets of downtown, a short walk from the slopes of Aspen Mountain.
The Aspen Art Museum, housed in Shigeru Ban's woven-timber building, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village and the Aspen Institute, whose campus was shaped by Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer, give the valley a cultural life of rare depth. Beyond the valley, the Denver Art Museum anchors Colorado's art scene, and the arts pages of The Aspen Times follow every opening and every season.
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.
Every summer, Aspen Art Week brings together the Aspen Art Museum's ArtCrush gala, the Intersect Aspen art fair and openings in the town's galleries. From the Aspen Art Museum to Anderson Ranch and the Bauhaus heritage of Herbert Bayer, Aspen 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. In Aspen, gold arrives with the seasons: every September, the aspen groves of the Roaring Fork Valley turn to gold beneath the Maroon Bells, one of the most celebrated sights in Colorado.
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 Aspen, where high-altitude light is crisp and bright, snow reflects the winter sun and alpenglow warms the peaks at dusk, gold brings warmth into the room: it catches light, holds it and returns it as radiance, against stone, timber and snow.
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.
Aspen knows this territory well. From Aspen Santa Fe Ballet to the historic Wheeler Opera House and the summer concerts of the Aspen Music Festival and School, the town has long celebrated performance and the body in movement as forms 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 at home in a town devoted to body and mind, from morning practice on Aspen Meadows to the spas of its mountain hotels.
With the Golden Male & Female Diptych, the dialogue between two figures becomes a dialogue between the masculine and the feminine. Hung side by side above a stone fireplace or on a wall facing the mountains, 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.
Aspen knows this sense of scale. Since 1962, physicists from around the world have gathered at the Aspen Center for Physics to explore the origins of the universe, and at nearly 8,000 feet, the clear mountain sky above the valley reveals stars in astonishing numbers. Here, the human figure meets the vastness of the cosmos, 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 the long wall of a chalet great room or in the lobby of a historic hotel such as the Hotel Jerome, 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 Starwood bedroom, a private library or a quiet room on a snowy evening in the mountains.
Zack Zublena: Fine Art Photography in the Aspen Landscape
Aspen has a long relationship with photography and visual innovation. Herbert Bayer, who brought the spirit of the Bauhaus to the valley, worked across design, painting, sculpture and photography, and his legacy still shapes the town's visual culture.
For photography collectors and artists, the valley also offers Anderson Ranch Arts Center, whose photography programs have welcomed leading photographers for decades, and galleries 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 Aspen residences, chalets and hotels.
The Roaring Fork Valley is also home to Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, one of the most respected centers for photography and the visual arts in the American West, reinforcing the valley's relationship with fine art photography and collectible photographic prints.
Zack Zublena and the Aspen Art Experience
In Aspen, art lives everywhere: in museums and galleries, but also in the lobbies of The Little Nell and the St. Regis, in private residences, restaurants and ski-in, ski-out chalets from Aspen Highlands to Snowmass. An artwork can move naturally between a private collection, a luxury 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 mountain interiors where stone, timber, glass and natural light meet: from a Red Mountain residence to a downtown penthouse or a historic hotel.
For Aspen collectors and interior designers, 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
