Gabriel Zea

Born in Singapore, and raised in Houston, TX, I’m a Colombian-American creating oil paintings preoccupied with the aesthetics of conventional expressions of gender, and how these conventions are both limiting and freeing all at once. Growing up middle-class in Texas, the specter of being judged as not masculine, or coming across as not in total command of one’s own emotions, was constant. The concept of ‘ideal masculinity’ vs. ‘ideal femininity’ was an ever-present, ever-shifting topic in my mind, as it seemed to endlessly influence the behavior of myself and others. The contradictory and impossible nature of these ideal concepts of gender don’t seem to affect our devotion to them, and my paintings similarly represent a devotion to and suspicion of the very gendered forms of expression that surrounded me as I grew. My goal is to envision a seductive world where these corrupted idealizations of gendered behavior can be observed and an association with violence or self-destruction is either explicit or never too far away.

Maryland Institute College of Art '13

Osaka Gakuin University

New York Academy of Art '15