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.