Lana Frey
Lana Frey (b. 1974) is a Czech painter working across portraiture, landscape, and still life, freely mixing fauvism, pop art, impressionism, and abstraction. Working almost exclusively with a palette knife, Frey builds her paintings in fast, large strokes, deliberately never planning colour or shading in advance and never sketching faces beforehand, a method she describes plainly: "throwing paint emotionally on canvas and removing what you don't like while leaving what is beautiful." She often works on several canvases simultaneously, and rarely goes a day without painting. The results carry a vivid, dreamlike quality, closer to invented myth than direct observation, built through what she calls "a living and spontaneous process and clean improvisation."
Frey's work draws heavily on history, myth, and legend, inspirations she traces to years spent travelling, listening to the stories, folklore, and local legends of the people she met. Above all, she is driven by emotion: the diverse, shifting mix of feelings that make up ordinary daily life, love, joy, desire, sadness, caught and translated into colour and balanced, harmonious form. Accompanied by original mythological narratives written by Frey herself, her paintings extend the same instinct for storytelling that once led her, between periods of painting, to write books and poetry of her own.
Frey studied art from an early age, from 1982 to 1988, in the studio of the artist and teacher Tolmachev M.S., during which time she exhibited in Japan and Poland as a member of that studio, later expanding her education into design and décor. Following her studies, she spent an extended period travelling, through Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Spain, and Italy among other countries, before returning fully to painting. She now lives and works in Prague, where she has operated her own studio since 2020.
Frey has exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, including with Carré d'Artistes in Paris, New York, and Marseille, at Eclectic Gallery in London, La Griffe in Rome, Gallerie Guy Pensa in Algrange, France, and in New York's Soho district, alongside the Umschlagplatz art fair in Bad Staffelstein, Germany, in 2021 and 2023. In 2024, she held a solo exhibition, Can You See Me?, at Thalia Gallery in Athens, and in 2026 she premiered a new collection, Pillars of Eternity, in Prague. She was named Artist of the Month by the ArtCorner portal in September 2016.
Lana Frey (b. 1974) is a Czech painter working across portraiture, landscape, and still life, freely mixing fauvism, pop art, impressionism, and abstraction. Working almost exclusively with a palette knife, Frey builds her paintings in fast, large strokes, deliberately never planning colour or shading in advance and never sketching faces beforehand, a method she describes plainly: "throwing paint emotionally on canvas and removing what you don't like while leaving what is beautiful." She often works on several canvases simultaneously, and rarely goes a day without painting. The results carry a vivid, dreamlike quality, closer to invented myth than direct observation, built through what she calls "a living and spontaneous process and clean improvisation."
Frey's work draws heavily on history, myth, and legend, inspirations she traces to years spent travelling, listening to the stories, folklore, and local legends of the people she met. Above all, she is driven by emotion: the diverse, shifting mix of feelings that make up ordinary daily life, love, joy, desire, sadness, caught and translated into colour and balanced, harmonious form. Accompanied by original mythological narratives written by Frey herself, her paintings extend the same instinct for storytelling that once led her, between periods of painting, to write books and poetry of her own.
Frey studied art from an early age, from 1982 to 1988, in the studio of the artist and teacher Tolmachev M.S., during which time she exhibited in Japan and Poland as a member of that studio, later expanding her education into design and décor. Following her studies, she spent an extended period travelling, through Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Spain, and Italy among other countries, before returning fully to painting. She now lives and works in Prague, where she has operated her own studio since 2020.
Frey has exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, including with Carré d'Artistes in Paris, New York, and Marseille, at Eclectic Gallery in London, La Griffe in Rome, Gallerie Guy Pensa in Algrange, France, and in New York's Soho district, alongside the Umschlagplatz art fair in Bad Staffelstein, Germany, in 2021 and 2023. In 2024, she held a solo exhibition, Can You See Me?, at Thalia Gallery in Athens, and in 2026 she premiered a new collection, Pillars of Eternity, in Prague. She was named Artist of the Month by the ArtCorner portal in September 2016.