WILFREDO PRIETO ARRIVES IN LIMA WITH A NEW INVESTIGATION INTO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, PAINTING, AND THE ECONOMY OF THE OBJECT
Invited by Galería Gato to develop a site-specific project, the renowned Cuban conceptual artist juxtaposes the immateriality of AI-generated synthetic images with the economic and social dimensions of recycling in the South American context.
August 2026.— 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), entitled Neblina alrededor del árbol (Mist Around the Tree).
With a career marked by exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Centre Pompidou, as well as participation in the Venice, São Paulo, and Havana Biennials, Prieto continues his ongoing investigation into the economy of means, the tensions embedded within everyday objects, and conceptual displacement.
Conceived and developed entirely in Lima following an invitation from Galería Gato, the project further establishes the Republican-era house overlooking Plaza Bolognesi as an active hub for production and exchange within the international contemporary art scene.
For this exhibition, Prieto approaches pictorial representation through landscapes generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and printed onto canvas. These images—which evoke the aesthetic neutrality of desktop wallpapers and stock photography—are subsequently altered through the physical assemblage of plastic and metal bottle caps. The operation creates a counterpoint between the immateriality of digital consumption and the local recycling economy.
“For me, these AI-generated images represent a return to the boundary between photography and painting; they are a fictional creation, yet one that is easy to find, hovering around the idea of the Romantic artist who exaggerates the atmosphere in order to blur the boundary between reality and creativity,” explains Wilfredo Prieto. “I was looking for a distance in which authorship does not exist and the image has no style of its own, but instead belongs to anyone,” he adds.
By relocating an everyday material with no individual value onto a technologically produced pictorial surface, the exhibition interrogates notions of ownership, technical reproducibility, and authorship in the era of large language models. The project contrasts the sophistication of the synthetic image with the everyday gesture of the Lima waste picker, inviting viewers to reconsider how visual fiction is constructed and how value is assigned within contemporary art.
About the Artist and the Gallery
Wilfredo Prieto
(Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, 1978)
Marked by an almost scandalous simplicity, Wilfredo Prieto’s sculptures and installations function as tools for exploring social, poetic, and political themes.
His work questions the fundamental structures of contemporary culture and reflects on consumption, society, and thought itself. Although Prieto initially trained as a painter, his practice refuses to be confined to any particular medium. While some of his projects may be extremely ambitious from a technical perspective, most of his actions and gestures operate within remarkably subtle territory, inviting us to distance ourselves from familiar experiences. The artist appropriates the world around him, giving form to ideas through radical, precarious, and fragile gestures.
Through his work, Prieto presents metaphors and narratives open to interpretation, crystallised in everyday objects and recognisable materials drawn from daily life. In response to the saturation and relentless pace of contemporary society, Prieto proposes a language of essentials: what may go unnoticed can often be the most powerful.
Wilfredo Prieto studied at the Escuela Profesional de Artes Plásticas in Trinidad, Cuba, from 1992 to 1996, and subsequently attended the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana from 1998 to 2002. During this period, he was also a member of the artist collective Galería DUPP (Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica), with whom he received the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts in 2000. He has participated in artist residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (2015); Gasworks, London (2008); Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, France (2007); and the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2005). Wilfredo Prieto lives and works between Mexico City and Havana, Cuba.
About Galería Gato
Founded in December 2024, Galería Gato has emerged as a key player in the contemporary art scene, engaging with the world from the heart of Lima’s historic centre. Located in a fully restored Republican-era house overlooking Plaza Bolognesi, Gato transforms a heritage building into a meeting point for art.
More than a gallery, Gato is a space where art provokes, questions, and connects. Its curatorial programme brings together artists from five continents, combining established names with emerging voices, while positioning itself as a platform that challenges conventions, generates questions, and connects the local with the international.
In addition to its main exhibition space, the gallery features Espacio Abierto, a flexible venue that hosts parallel projects developed in collaboration with public and private institutions, collectors, and local and international cultural agents. This programme reaffirms Gato’s commitment to making innovative artistic proposals from different parts of the world freely accessible, in keeping with its curatorial vision and its engagement with diverse audiences, including educational institutions, first-time collectors, and other interested publics.
During the second half of the year, Espacio Abierto presents works by Sandra Poulson, David Douard, Jack O’Brien, Athena Papadopoulos, Marcelo Cidade, and Rodrigo Arteaga.
By inhabiting and reimagining a building steeped in history, Galería Gato takes on a new role within Lima’s cultural ecosystem: that of a living space for creation, memory, and transformation.
