Artist Bio

Lala Drona’s practice explores the rupture between the body and external forces—whether violent, social, or digital—treating painting as a space where collision becomes a site for rebirth.

Born in Denver, Colorado, she is currently pursuing a Master’s in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London. Lala Drona publishes and exhibits her work internationally, with her most recent exhibition "Virtual Reverence" in Paris, France exploring the techno-spiritual relationship between humans and their devices.

Drona constructs a fictional universe that extends beyond the canvas, incorporating painting, performance, video, and writing. Her work invites viewers to confront the disintegration of the physical world, balancing mourning with an unrelenting drive for rebirth. 

She currently works and lives between London and Paris.

ABOUT THE WORK

Artist Statement

In a body, yet removed—into the slippage: the digital, the haze of a dream, and fragments of memory from an unknown time or place.

Rebirth is a rupture, an unavoidable collision.

My paintings are the final cry of humanity’s diminishing physical experience, as connections to the body and its sensations weaken in an increasingly digital and violent world. The textured surfaces evoke a visceral quality, with disembodied forms haunted by isolation, each transformed into uncanny figures.

My process merges digital repetition with the physicality of sensation: working on both wall and floor, I use my fingers to rub, scratch, and spread the paint, leaving traces that reveal underlying layers and create a tension between the mechanical and the tactile.

The digital influence is evident in my sequential addition of figures to the composition, where information accumulates like the copy-paste function of a keyboard—each figure’s lack of interaction reflecting our fragmented experience of life in the post-digital era.

Through a wide range of styles, mediums, marks, and textures, I reflect a contemporary world defined by excess and disorder. This is contrasted by the use of gradated backgrounds, which evoke the online world—a space where softening removes information, and where the more unknown, resides the more divine.

Through visceral textures and haunting imagery, these paintings invite viewers to reflect on the disintegration of the physical world, conveying both mourning and an unrelenting drive for rebirth.