Bio

Pilar Lagos is a Honduran visual artist raised between Honduras and Egypt. Recent exhibitions include: Spectrograms of the Body, The Well, Scandinavia House (New York, NY); and a display of 10 prints at the ContinuEd Project Space (School of Visual Arts, 2024). Group exhibitions include: Contemporary Print – Traditional to Digital (Long Island City, NY); Long Transmission (Port Chester, NY); Fragments of Us: The Art of Becoming (Baton Rouge, LA); SVACE Summer Showcase, School of Visual Arts (New York, NY);
Myths and Legends of the World at Miami International Fine Arts (Miami, FL). Pilar is a recipient of the 2025 New Work Queens Arts Fund and is an alumna of the 2023 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. She has participated in artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Directangle Press, and Zea Mays Printmaking. She lives and works in New York City.

Artist Statement

My work explores estrangement from culture and body, and I create in response to the inner conversations between alienation and longing. Uprooted from my Latino culture at an early age and raised in a foreign country rich with customs that were not mine, I constantly carry a latent sense of never truly feeling at home anywhere.

My printmaking practice consists primarily of collagraphs, monotypes, drypoints and etchings. I build collagraph plates from medicine blister packs, string, and acrylic mediums. These plates are not meant to be archival; instead, they mimic the wear and tear our bodies endure while navigating systems not designed for us. Through printmaking, I explore social masking as a strategy for individuals navigating life with chronic illness, drawing from a wide body of medical and disability scholarship.

In my painting practice, I incorporate found materials to evoke the raw emotions of pain, the alienation of the body, and the impersonal nature of the medical industry—like my name, constantly mispronounced by medical personnel. These materials confront the abstract concept of “health” as defined by institutions that demand proof of invisible disability. My paintings also include my cat, Cleo. While these images may seem disparate from my medical trauma work, they explore the impossibility of the rendered image: a clear connection to the MRIs and CT scans I use to show an impossibly incomplete rendering of a human life.

My hope is for others to connect with the work and see themselves in it: not as objects of medical sympathy, but as people of resilience, complexity, and beauty. I make art on my own terms, rejecting productivity norms, and using imperfect and repurposed materials.