BRAVA Award Winner 2026 – Gabriel Zea
Congratulations to our 2026 BRAVA Award Emerging Artist winner, Gabriel Zea!
The BIMA Recognizes Achievement in the Visual Arts (BRAVA) Awards are an annual award that honors four exceptional contemporary artists, craftspeople, or makers whose work demonstrates artistic excellence, technical mastery, and meaningful contributions to the arts community. The awards is presented in four categories, recognizing individual achievement and the broader impact these artists have had on the arts landscape.
Continue reading to learn more about this category, Gabriel Zea, and his work.
Category: Emerging Artist (Puget Sound Region)
The BRAVA Award for Emerging Artist recognizes the work of contemporary visual artists and craftspeople in the Puget Sound region who are early in their professional careers. This award is intended for artists who have gained initial recognition for their visual arts practice, demonstrate a serious commitment to pursuing a career in the arts, and whose work is considered promising by a jury. Eligible artists work in a variety of media, including but not limited to fiber/textile, painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, performance art, installation, ceramics, and mixed-media or collaborative projects.
This award is open to artists based in the Puget Sound region, which includes Skagit, Snohomish, King, Pierce, Thurston, Mason, Jefferson, Whatcom, Clallam, Kitsap, Island, and San Juan Counties.
About Gabriel Zea
Born in Singapore to a Colombian family and raised in a multicultural community in Houston, TX, my desire to create artwork has always been born from a desire to find a calm interior livelihood despite an outside world that is frequently in flux.
I received my BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and then my MFA soon after from the New York Academy of Art. During undergrad, I spent an influential year in Japan studying printmaking and the Japanese language. Later, upon finishing my MFA, I spent another year attending artist residencies in Spain, Germany, Russia, and here in the United States. Afterward, I moved to Brooklyn to work as an assistant for Sean Kenney, an artist who creates immersive sculptures out of LEGO bricks. I transitioned to working more independently as an artist in 2018, creating my own work, commissioned work, and occasionally working as assistant to other prominent painters in NYC. In 2023, I moved to Seattle to live closer to family and have continued exhibiting my paintings around the country while working from a studio at Base Camp Studios 2 in downtown Seattle.
Artist’s Statement
For the past few years I’ve been creating oil paintings with chaotic compositions of figures embroiled in or surrounded by some kind of conflict, physical or internal, rendered in a monochrome or duotone coloring scheme that serves to unite all the disparate elements into a cohesive and atmospheric image.
This imagery I’ve come to create has largely come from a desire to visualize, in as visceral a metaphor as I can, the emotionally conflicting experience of navigating the incredible visual chaos of the modern digital world that is full of a dizzying range of styles that can encompass eye-catching advertisements, seamless and seductive graphic design or UI, purposefully haphazard imagery cleverly put together, and even AI created amalgamations that can capably mimic reality. The whirlwind of commentary and contradicting opinions cast by the internet onto this circus of visual media and propaganda creates in my view a kind of schizophrenic headspace consisting of ceaseless friction. Visualizing this headspace in a grounded style, fused with the historicity of figurative realism and physicality of oil painting in particular, provides distance and catharsis, and invites philosophical questions about the constant tumult, physical and emotional, that the modern world seems to invite. My work aims to reach those who also feel inundated in the modern discourse of social media, politics, and pop culture, and want to step back to try to frame and digest the discourse in a more primal form.