Zack Zublena Selected by Singulart: A North American Artist to Follow in Seattle
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 Seattle, the city that grew rich as the gateway to the Klondike Gold Rush, his golden figures bring warmth and radiance to the soft light of the Pacific Northwest.
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 Seattle interior, from a Queen Anne residence overlooking Elliott Bay to a Lake Washington home in Madison Park or a modern house in Medina, the work becomes a point of warmth and stillness against the Northwest's silver light: 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.
Seattle: Where Northwest Art, Craft and Innovation Meet
Seattle has become one of the most distinctive art cities on the West Coast. From the historic galleries of Pioneer Square to the museums of downtown and Seattle Center, the city brings together artists, collectors, designers and the innovators of the Pacific Northwest.
The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and its Olympic Sculpture Park, the Frye Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington and Chihuly Garden and Glass shape a cultural landscape in which photography, painting, glass and sculpture are in constant dialogue, a dialogue followed closely by the arts pages of The Seattle 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.
Since 1981, the First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square has opened the city's galleries to the public each month. Today, from SAM's Olympic Sculpture Park on the waterfront to the Henry Art Gallery and the glass of Chihuly Garden and Glass, Seattle 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 Seattle, gold is also part of the city's story: in 1897, the Klondike Gold Rush turned Seattle into the gateway to the North, a chapter still remembered at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Pioneer Square.
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 Seattle, where soft silver light drifts over Puget Sound and long summer evenings glow above the Olympic Mountains, gold brings warmth into the room: it catches even the gentlest light, holds it and returns it as radiance.
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.
Seattle knows this territory well. From Pacific Northwest Ballet at McCaw Hall to Seattle Opera and the experimental stage of On the Boards, 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 at home in a city where mornings begin with a walk around Green Lake or a quiet practice before the workday.
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 water, 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.
Seattleites know this sense of scale. The Space Needle was built for the 1962 World's Fair as a symbol of the Space Age, and the city's aerospace heritage lives on at the Museum of Flight. 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 Capitol Hill loft or in the lobby of a downtown Seattle 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 Mercer Island bedroom, a private library or a quiet room above the Sound on a rainy afternoon.
Zack Zublena: Fine Art Photography in the Seattle Landscape
Seattle holds a meaningful place in the history of American photography. Imogen Cunningham studied at the University of Washington and opened her first portrait studio in Seattle, and Edward S. Curtis built his photographic career from his studio in the city.
For photography collectors, the city also offers spaces dedicated to the medium, from the photography collection of the Henry Art Gallery to the Photographic Center Northwest on Capitol Hill, 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 finds a natural place in Seattle residences, galleries and hotels.
Seattle is also home to the Photographic Center Northwest and to Pioneer Square galleries such as G. Gibson Gallery, long dedicated to fine art photography, reinforcing the city's relationship with collectible photographic prints.
Zack Zublena and the Seattle Art Experience
In Seattle, art lives everywhere: in museums and galleries, but also in hotel lobbies, private residences, restaurants, tech campuses and waterfront homes from Bellevue to Bainbridge Island. 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 Northwest architecture, where wood, glass and natural light meet: from a Lake Washington residence to a South Lake Union apartment or a hotel downtown.
For Seattle 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
