Lino Lago 'Fake Abstract' Print Available

Artist: Lino Lago
Title: Fake Abstract
Medium: Deckled Varnished Giclee Print
Size: 27 x 23 Inches
Edition: 45
Price: £595

 

Lino Lago (b. 1973, Redondela, Spain) is a Madrid-trained painter who stages elegant collisions between Old-Master finesse and digital-age minimalism. After graduating from the Universidad Complutense, he became fascinated by reports of painting’s “death,” responding with the long-running Fake Abstract series: meticulous oil reproductions of Renaissance and Bourbon portraits that he half-obscures with flat monochrome or gold-leaf swipes, leaving only a sliver of face or lace visible beneath a seemingly Photoshop generated mask. The device questions authenticity, value, and how screens mediate our contact with history. Technical rigor underpins the joke each passage of flesh is modeled with 18th century glazing, while the overlay is sanded to vinyl like smoothness, so brushstroke and pixel coexist on one skin.

Lago’s work has entered public collections including Harvard Business School and the Flint Institute of Arts, and has been shown at ARCO Madrid, Pulse Miami, and in solo exhibitions from New York to Copenhagen. Awards such as the BMW Painting Prize from the Queen of Spain and the Vilnius City Arts Award confirm institutional respect for his conceptual sleight of hand. Recent shows like Multipolar (2025) expand the lexicon, pitting Caravaggio against color field slabs to evoke a fragmented, many-centered cultural world. Living between Madrid and Vilnius, Lago continues to probe how much of the past we actually need to see before we admit the present has already re-written it.