Create! Magazine is pleased to share the work of Spanish figurative painter Sofia Zuluaga.

Zuluaga's works have been exhibited in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy, Mexico, Germany and Spain, and she has been selected as a finalist in renowned competitions such as Figurativas and ModPortrait. She has exhibited in several museums including the Museo Pablo Serrano (Zaragoza, Spain), Museu Europeu D’art Modern (Barcelona, Spain), Museo de la Caja Real (San Luis Potosí, Mexico), and Museum of Now (Berlin, Germany). Additionally, she has participated in highly prestigious exhibitions including the first exhibition by a Spanish museum dedicated to give visibility to the LGBT+ community (Una mirada LGTBI+ a la Colección del MEAM), the first exhibition dedicated to contemporary women painters in Spain (Mujeres Artistas Hoy 17, MEAM Museum), and their latest exhibition featuring the top international female figurative artists (Women Painting, All Over the World, MEAM Museum). Currently, she resides in Spain.

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Artist Statement

As a queer Latina figurative artist, her dominant themes of exploration revolve around inciting rebellion against our social conditioning; the identifying paradigms determining who and what each individual is entitled to be. Sexuality, identity and body image are omnipresent throughout her paintings. She explore facets of these that are still taboo as a connecting thread to deeper conversations of psychological and social awareness and in tandem questions contemporary beauty standards and aesthetics. In her latest series, P•anopticon, she has used Foucault’s panopticism as a metaphor of our physical and psychological confinement. The series rose to challenge the social indoctrination that we are subjected at the collective and individual level. This coercion is not something that has been implemented as a result of current events (although the circumstances have made her series all more relevant) but instead have been applied for centuries by those in positions of power (i.e. government, religion, mass media, big brother, etc). P•anopticon explores the attempts made in search of liberation, but also poses the viewer to question whether this is feasible at all, hence the title’s allusion to the anopticon, the antithesis of the panopticon.

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For more work by the artist, follow her on Instagram.