LANA TAFANEL

Lana Tafanel is a Barcelona-based painter working in conceptual realism. She paints recognisable human figures not to capture the moment and document the reality but to explore ideas shaped by research. 

She studied at the Barcelona Academy of Art, graduating from the full-time drawing and painting programme in 2023. Her work has been shown internationally in Barcelona, Rome, and New York, including at Mobile World Congress through a collaboration between Google and the European Museum of Modern Art.

Her practice has been shaped by 16 year of living across very different cultures. This experience led to an ongoing interest in how people respond when the world around them changes faster than they can adapt.

Her current series, The Lighthouse: Life After Work, explores this through the topic of automation and the future of work.  The figures in these paintings are not lost, but they have not yet arrived. They are human beings in the middle of becoming something they cannot yet name.

The work is informed by research and conversations with educators, scientists, and professionals who are already experiencing these shifts in real life.