Federico Galavis is a Venezuelan-American artist based in Los Angeles whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, digital art and installation. His work is informed by memory, translation and belonging as an immigrant, and draws on saturated color and figurative shapes from Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism. He incorporates AI and code, treating software as a brush and the algorithm as a creative tool, and uses blockchain for provenance.
Before he began painting, Galavis worked as an actor in commercials, music videos and independent films, an experience with framing and cinematography that continues to inform his work.He calls his art a movement he terms “Nationalist Figurative Abstract Expressionism”.In 2015 he showed The Extermination of the Venezuelan People: 17 Years of Controlled Regime, a series of nine paintings on political oppression in Venezuela, at Expo Chicago alongside a symphonic poem written and performed by the pianist Gabriela Montero.,,He later painted El Tigre, a sculpture for the Funny Zoo public art initiative, as a tribute to a Venezuelan town near the Orinoco Belt's oil fields.
In 2019 Galavis held his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “A Journey Towards Freedom”, at SHOW Gallery.,He moved into NFT and crypto art in 2022 with “TrashArt: NFT Garbology” at L'Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris, a show of the TrashArt movement curated by the artist Robness.,His NFT-era work has since appeared in group exhibitions curated by the artist Beeple in Charleston and in the Barrett Gallery survey “DNA Fourth of Four: 40 Years of Digital Art” in Santa Monica.Galavis has served as a Commissioner on the Santa Monica Arts Commission and chaired its Media Arts Committee.
Celestial Folds: Origami in Space is a generative work Galavis made in collaboration with AI and released on fx(hash), built from childhood memories of folding paper and set to meditation frequencies he discovered through sound bowl practice.He has also developed The Uber Diary, a Kickstarter-funded conceptual project that turns handwritten reflections into a limited-edition art book and an accompanying exhibition.
