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, intuition and emotion.

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.