Draft:Lala Drona
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Last edited by Number5soulbrother (talk | contribs) 67 minutes ago. (Update) |
Lala Drona | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1988 (age 37–38) Denver, Colorado, US |
| Education | University of Colorado (BA), Royal College of Art (MA) |
| Occupation | Painter |
| Website | https://www.laladrona.com/ |
Lala Drona is an American-born painter of Venezuelan heritage currently residing in Paris.[1]
Biography
[edit]Drona was born in 1988 in Denver, Colorado.[2][3] Her father is from New York, and her mother immigrated to the U.S. from Caracas, Venezuela.[4] She earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Colorado.[2][3] She graduated from the Royal College of Art MA Painting program in 2025.[1][5] While there, she studied under Johnny Golding, among others.[6]
Career
[edit]Drona’s work has been exhibited at group exhibitions in Paris,[7][8][9] London,[10] Seville,[11][12] Göteborg,[13] and New York.[14] Her solo exhibition Virtual Reverence was exhibited at the Elios Art Gallery in Paris in 2024.[15] Her diptych Between Us (2019) is also included in the Musée Artistes Femmes collection in Lausanne, Switzerland.[1][16]
In addition to painting, Drona's practice has also included video art,[17] as well as a textual, mock-journalistic fictional universe called Lala Laboratories that she explores on her blog Based On A Fact.[18]
In 2024, she became a Soho House International Artist Fellowship Recipient.[1]
In 2026, she was listed a finalist for the 20th edition of the Prisma Art Prize.[19]
Artistry
[edit]"Art is about rejecting our presented reality and what’s valued in our system." - Lala Drona[20]
Recurring themes in Drona’s work include her Venezuelan heritage[4] and her experience with unilateral breast hypoplasia and the reconstructive surgeries undertaken over her lifetime.[6][15][21][22] In an interview with Claire Zakiewicz, Drona mentions "I filmed my surgeries and played those videos on loop in the studio. Watching the surgeons’ hands – the movements, the forms beneath the skin — all of it got imprinted in my mind. Those gestures made their way into my body, and then onto the canvas. That shift pulled me into something far more raw and otherworldly: these liminal, suspended spaces that sit somewhere between the physical and the digital," adding "My paintings now trace moments of collision – body with machine, violence with care, spirit with matter. I don’t resolve my paintings – and that’s the point. I realized I was painting the site of the cut: not a place of healing, not of pain, but something suspended, still open."[6] Writer Len Gordon notes that “[her] experience [with reconstructive surgery as a teenager]—at once clinical and existential—reverberates through her practice.”[21] Zakiewicz states "Her paintings live in the frayed boundary between body and image, formed in the wake of surgical intervention...She uses the canvas to excavate the body’s memory."[6]
Other influences and themes in her work include intersectional feminism,[23] the female and male gazes,[23][24] and her experiences growing up with punk.[25][26]
On her podcast Seen, writer and curator Carie Scott notes that Drona "constructs a world where mourning and rebirth collide. She’s exploring the techno-spiritual bonds between humans and our devices, and these are big questions being kind of writ bare in paint. And the paint’s visceral. It’s layered, it’s haunting, it’s really physical against these questions about what a post-digital world might look like."[25][26] Talking to Scott, Drona says of her use of painting as a medium, "it's almost a protest or a way of holding onto the physical world, holding onto something that makes us human, the beautiful parts of being human."[25][26]
Solo exhibitions
[edit]2019
- The Box, Konstepidemin, Göteborg, Sweden[13]
2024
- Virtual Reverence, Elios Gallery, Paris, France[15]
Group exhibitions
[edit]2022
- Video + Performance, Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, New York
2024
- Fall, Beaconsfield Contemporary Gallery, London, England, United Kingdom[10]
2026
- Immanence, Robegago Gallery, Paris, France[7]
Gallery
[edit]References
[edit]- 1 2 3 4 "Lala Drona | CV & Artist Bio". www.laladrona.com. Archived from the original on 2025-08-25. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 "Lala Drona". Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 "Lala Drona ‹ Konstepidemin". konstepidemin.se. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 "Caracas: A Triptych on War and Duality through Painting".
- ↑ "Lala Drona – Student Profiles 2025". 2025.rca.ac.uk. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 3 4 Zakiewicz, Claire (2025-09-13). "Lala Drona". Creatrix magazine. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 "Works - Immanence". Galerie Robegago. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- ↑ "Instagram". www.instagram.com. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- ↑ "Bienvenue rue de l'Hôtel de Ville !". THE GAZE OF A PARISIENNE (in French). 2019-10-14. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 beaconsfield (2024-10-22). "FALL – a Film Poem Sampler - Beaconsfield". Beaconsfield -. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- ↑ Domínguez, Francisco J. (2018-07-21). "Arte internacional para el estío de Castilblanco". El Correo de Andalucía (in Spanish). Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- ↑ Cancelo, Ángeles B. (2018-07-18). "Artistas internacionales comparten su obra en una muestra colectiva en Castilblanco de los Arroyos". Diario ABC (in Spanish). Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 "The Box, Exhibition ‹ Konstepidemin". konstepidemin.se. Retrieved 2026-09-18.
- ↑ "Instagram". www.instagram.com. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- 1 2 3 Gallery, Elios Art. "Elios Art Gallery — Pop-Up Exhibitions in Paris". elios-gallery.art (in French). Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- ↑ "LES BANDITS graphisme + illustration". LES BANDITS graphisme + illustration (in French). Archived from the original on 2026-01-16. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- ↑ "Lala Drona". YouTube. Retrieved 2026-09-22.
- ↑ "About". Based On A Fact. 2013-09-28. Retrieved 2026-09-22.
- ↑ "Prisma Art Prize | 20th EDITION – Year 5". Retrieved 2026-09-24.
- ↑ "Spotlight: Lala Drona". Paris Lit Up. Retrieved 2026-09-24.
- 1 2 Gordon, Len (2025-05-28). "The Last Place We Felt: On the Fractured Bodies of Lala Drona". Art Plugged. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
- ↑ Madness Cafe Podcast (2021-12-15). Ep. 25: Art For The Female Gaze, with Lala Drona, a story about Unilateral Breast Agenesis. Retrieved 2026-09-26 – via YouTube.
- 1 2 "Instagram". www.instagram.com. Retrieved 2026-09-26.
- ↑ Koskinen, Nathalie (2024-06-11). "Women in art – a sexist history to be rewritten". International Journalism. Retrieved 2026-09-26.
- 1 2 3 "Lala Drona by Seen". Spotify for Creators. Retrieved 2026-09-22.
- 1 2 3 Seen (2025-05-20). Lala Drona. Retrieved 2026-09-22 – via YouTube.