José Delgado Zuñiga (b. Ventura, CA) is a contemporary painter who creates rhythmic, allegorical works shaped by memory and sound, examining how freedom and identity are formed and negotiated. Operating at the intersection of image, sound, and memory, his work explores how visual form registers and reorganizes systems of experience.

His paintings treat the canvas as a site of accumulation, where figures, objects, and symbols are compressed into dense, interdependent structures.

Working through processes of layering, distortion, and spatial compression, Zúñiga constructs compositions in which forms collide and overlap, producing what he describes as “knots”—configurations that index the entanglement of personal, cultural, and historical forces. These knots do not illustrate narrative; rather, they operate as systems in which meaning is continuously negotiated and redistributed across the surface, holding forms in tension between stability and transformation—a condition that reflects an ongoing negotiation between being and becoming.

Delgado Zuñiga earned an MFA in Painting from Columbia University and a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Notable exhibitions include Central Sounds, (Luhring Augustine, New York City 2022), IN THE KNOW, SHOW (GreenFamily Art Foundation, 2024), CUSP (Marquez Art Projects, 2023), and Fire Figure Fantasy (ICA Miami, 2022) He is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and the Robert Gamblin Fellowship, and has participated in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program. His work is in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Marquez Art Projects; Cuernavaca Tres, Mexico City; The Herbert and Lenore Schorr Collection; and the Hessel Bard Museum of Art. He lives and works in Miami.