Bio

Pilar Lagos (b. 1986, Santiago, Chile) is a Honduran visual artist raised between Honduras and Egypt. She lives and works in Long Island City, NY. Recent solo 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. Pilar is also a co-founder of Immaterial Projects, an artist-run curatorial collective.

Artist Statement

My work explores estrangement from both one’s culture and one’s body, and I create in response to the inner conversations between alienation and longing. I was uprooted from my Latino culture at an early age and grew up in a foreign country, rich with customs and traditions that were not mine. This sense of estrangement — never truly feeling at home anywhere — is a recurring theme. My commitment to using a variety of mediums is to celebrate my eclectic upbringing, and, I reflect it across my painting and printmaking practice.

I incorporate expired medications, glass flakes, and found materials to evoke the raw emotions of pain, alienation of the body, impersonal elements of the medical industry — like my name, which medical personnel constantly mispronounce, and to confront the abstract concept of health. My painting practice also includes another subject: my cat, Cleo. While these paintings seem at first disparate from my work concerning medical trauma, images of Cleo explore the impossibility of the rendered image — a clear connection to the MRI’s and CT scans that I use to show an impossibly incomplete rendering of a human life.

My printmaking practice consists primarily of collagraphs and monotypes. I build collagraph plates from medicine blister packs, string, and acrylic mediums. These plates are not built to be archival; instead, these items mimic the wear and tear that our bodies go through as we age. Through printmaking, I also explore themes of social masking as a coping mechanism for individuals navigating life while dealing with chronic illnesses, drawing from a wide body of medical and academic scholarship. My hope is for people to connect with the work and see themselves in it.