WILFREDO PRIETO IN LIMA: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, PAINTING, AND THE ECONOMY OF THE OBJECT

From September 4 to October 17, 2026, Galería Gato presents the first solo exhibition in Peru by conceptual artist Wilfredo Prieto (Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, 1978), titled Neblina alrededor del árbol.

With a career marked by exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and participation in the Venice, São Paulo, and Havana Biennials, Prieto continues his exploration of economy of means, the tension inherent in everyday objects, and conceptual displacement.

The project, conceived and developed entirely in Lima following an invitation from Galería Gato, establishes the republican-era house on Plaza Bolognesi as an active node of production and exchange for international contemporary art.

For this project, Prieto approaches pictorial representation through landscapes generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and printed on canvas. These images—which evoke the aesthetic neutrality of screen wallpapers and stock photography—are then physically intervened through the assembly of plastic and metal bottle caps. The operation generates a counterpoint between the immateriality of digital consumption and the economy of local recycling.

"For me, these AI-generated images are a return to the boundary between photography and painting; it's a fictitious yet readily available creation, one that skirts the idea of the romantic artist who exaggerates atmosphere to blur the line between the real and the creative," explained Wilfredo Prieto. "I was looking for a distance where authorship doesn't exist and the image has no style of its own, but rather belongs to everyone," he added.

By shifting an everyday input with no individual value onto a technological pictorial surface, the exhibition problematizes notions of ownership, technical reproducibility, and authorship in the age of large language models. 

Neblina alrededor del árbol will be on view from September 4 to October 17 at Galería Gato, Jirón Breña 281, Breña, Lima, Peru.