Sabrina Cabada’s portfolio is overflowing with vibrant, vintage-inspired portraits of bold and audacious women. Her muses—often based on photos she’s found online—tend to be daring and rebellious, iconoclastic and teasingly confrontational.Â
“They’re not all beautiful, perfect women,” explains the figurative painter, who lives in Falls Church. “I like the fact that they’re being naughty or smoking cigarettes. I tend to do a lot of sunglasses-wearing women, because I just think it’s a cool look.”Â
There’s a certain playfulness in their gestures, paired with bright colors and retro background patterns. Water is a recurring theme in acrylic and oil depictions of women in bathtubs, swimming pools and bohemian beach attire. (Her smallest canvases and prints start at $200.)
Art runs in Cabada’s family. Her father, Javier, is an acclaimed abstract painter, originally from Barcelona. Her mother, Consuelo, a savvy art dealer, managed the Aaron Gallery in D.C.’s Dupont Circle for 25 years before her death in 2007.Â
Steeped in the art world from a young age, Cabada staged her first solo exhibition at age 19. In 2017, she was commissioned to paint a series of 12 large murals at Mission Lofts on Columbia Pike. “I’ve done other things over the years,” she says, “but I really can’t live without painting and creating.”Â
In March, she opened Cabada Contemporary, a new gallery space at Canal Square in Georgetown. The inaugural exhibition, “Bloom,” featured works by both Cabada and her father, as well as Richmond-based artist Edward Alan Gross.