LANA TAFANEL
Biography
Lana Tafanel is a Barcelona-based painter working in conceptual realism. Her work centres on the human figure, using painting to explore questions shaped by research rather than to document the world as it is.
She has lived and worked across Eastern Europe and the Middle East, before settling in Barcelona, where 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, including in Rome and New York, and was selected through a collaboration between Google and MEAM Museum for Mobile World Congress.
Her current body of work, The Lighthouse: Life After Work, began with a question about purpose in a world where work no longer defines us. That question led to a single constant across every painting: no setting, no background, nothing to explain the figure. Over time the project evolved toward something more specific: the strength it takes to hold yourself together with nothing external to lean on.
education
Barcelona Academy of Art
Graduated in 2023
The Full-Time Drawing and Painting Programme
Courses and Workshops
2021 Portrait Painting Workshop by Vicente Romero Redondo, Italy
2018 Landscape and Seascape Oil Painting Workshop by Matt Ryder, UAE
2018 Old Masters Methodology by Ekaterina Zhivilova, Private Classes, Russia
Additional training:
2023 Fine Art Portrait Photography Course, Anna Krauklis School of Contemporary Photography