Artist Bio

Lala Drona is a Franco-American artist of Venezuelan heritage working between Paris and London. A graduate of the Royal College of Art (MA Painting), she has exhibited internationally, including her 2024 solo show Virtual Reverence at Elios Gallery, Paris.

Her paintings explore what she calls the “Abject Feminine,” turning away from external appearance to reveal the body as interior, visceral, and uncanny. Through satirical totemic figures and fleshy landscapes, she evokes forms that are familiar yet estranged, restrained yet spilling. These works capture the body not as fixed, but as unstable matter in a constant state of becoming.

Shaped by reconstructive surgeries and a bi-cultural upbringing among internet pioneers and entrepreneurs, Drona paints from the traces of lived corporeality. Her surfaces evoke the digital through paint, channeling gradients, distortions, and excess. Her work stages the body as a force of becoming that spills forward beyond containment, embodying a posthuman condition.

She works between Paris and London.

ABOUT THE WORK

Artist Statement

Lala Drona (Franco-American, Venezuelan heritage) is a painter working between Paris and London. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with highlights including Virtual Reverence (solo, Elios Gallery, Paris, 2024), and has been featured in Art Plugged and on Carrie Scott’s Seen podcast.

Her practice engages with what she terms the “Abject Feminine,” approaching the body not as an exterior form but as an interior, lived experience. Her canvases open onto visceral landscapes where flesh reorganizes, coagulates, and slips into uncanny hybrids. Satirical totemic figures and fleshy terrains conjure bodies that are unstable, other, and always in motion. Neither wholly human nor entirely abstract, these entities oscillate between estrangement, violence, and excess.

Drona’s process is tactile and insistent. Using gauze, palette knives, and her hands, she rubs,

scrapes, and spreads paint until surfaces shift and reorganize. The canvas moves between floor and wall: worked prone in a state closer to the unconscious body, then raised as the painting awakens into a more conscious presence. Each work carries contradiction, staging collapse and recomposition simultaneously.

Her trajectory is grounded in biography. Born with a congenital deformity requiring multiple reconstructive surgeries, and raised in a household of internet pioneers and entrepreneurs, she grew up attuned to the body’s viscerality as well as its cultural framing. These experiences inform a practice where paint itself evokes both the visceral body and the digital, channeling gradients, distortions, and excess that echo online spaces.

Drona’s paintings confront the inevitability of bodily evolution. They stage the body as something unstable yet expansive, spilling forward in relentless motion, a force of becoming that exceeds containment, embodying a posthuman condition.