Lala Drona

Paris, 2012–2019

Drona began her professional art career upon her move to Paris in 2012. One of her first works from this time was The Breast Series (2012–2013), painted self-portraits in which she disclosed her unilateral breast agenesis publicly for the first time. In 2015, she was among twelve international artists in Je suis... XYZ, a multidisciplinary exhibition in Paris exploring identity and freedom of expression that was inspired by the "Je suis Charlie" slogan that circulated after the January 2015 attacks. In 2018 and 2019, she was artist in residence near Seville and in Gothenburg.

Her work of this period examined the female gaze and the treatment of women's bodies online. The triptych The Power of the Click (2018), which explored whether the treatment of women's bodies online shapes their treatment offline, was shown in Castilblanco de los Arroyos, near Seville, in an exhibition of international artists in residence, and was published by the Poetry Society of New York. In 2019 she exhibited The Box at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg, a series of grayscale paintings shown with a video of the artist confined in a box that addressed voyeurism and online identity. She also presented the painting The Female Frame at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris that October, a work that was noted for reversing the conventions of the male gaze. Her diptych Between Us (2019) later entered the collection of the Musée Artistes Femmes in Lausanne.

2020–2024

In 2021, Drona had the breast implant from an earlier reconstructive surgery removed and in response began a series of "void" paintings, which she described as a confrontation with "this physical lack that I haven't seen for 17 years." Works of hers were published in Dreamhouse, a zine marking the 50th anniversary of Womanhouse (2022), and her essay "There Are No Great Young Artists" was published in La Revue Espace Artistes Femmes no. 2 in 2023. Her painting Proclaim was reproduced on the cover of The Oxford Handbook of LGBTI Law (2024).

In April 2024, she presented the solo exhibition Virtual Reverence at Elios Gallery in Paris; the Maison de l'Amérique Latine featured it in its "Hors les murs" program listings. Its central work, a painting with a live-camera video screen set into the canvas, relayed viewers' faces to an adjoining room without their knowledge. That year she also received a Soho House International Artist Fellowship and took part in Fall at Beaconsfield Gallery in London.

2025-present

Drona's painting Lopsided Prophecy (2025) was shown at the RCA degree show in June 2025.From February to March 2026 she showed Explant, Fantastical B****, and Madame Sidewalk in Immanence at Galerie Robegago in Paris, and she was named a finalist for the 20th Prisma Art Prize. In 2026 she painted Caracas, a triptych in oil and acrylic on canvas responding to the January 3, 2026, United States military operation in Venezuela, which she has described as a conflict between the two countries that made her; she named it after the city, on the model of Picasso's Guernica.

Methodology

Drona filmed her reconstructive surgeries and watched the footage repeatedly in the studio, so that the surgeons' gestures "made their way into my body, and then onto the canvas." Her paintings are started freeform on a canvas on a floor before moving to a wall for more deliberate decisions. Drona describes her paintings "almost as bodies and interventions happening on them". Following the Gutai movement's use of tools other than the brush, she paints with her fingers, rags, and gauze. Her main mediums are oil and acrylic often at large scale, including gauze-wrapped canvases. She has described her work as "punk," and links the angst viewers perceive in her paintings to her teenage years in the subculture: "I was, I guess, a ghost of the punk rockers."

Themes

Drona's experience of breast agenesis and reconstructive surgery is a foundational recurring theme in her practice. In Art Plugged, Len Gordon writes that this history reverberates through the work, comparing one of her figures to Edvard Munch's The Scream, noting that hers "unravels from the inside"; he also writes that she draws on Elinor Cleghorn's Unwell Women. Claire Zakiewicz in Creatrix describes the paintings as living "in the frayed boundary between body and image, formed in the wake of surgical intervention."

Zakiewicz also writes that in Drona's paintings "smooth voids evoke the divine emptiness of the digital." Speaking to curator Carrie Scott on the podcast Seen, Drona says that "modern beauty today is defined by non-resistance," contrasting the visceral texture of her paintings with the flattening and smoothing of images online and calling painting "almost a protest or a way of holding onto the physical world." Scott describes the paintings as "visceral," "layered," and "haunting," set against "questions about what a post-digital world might look like." In a 2025 interview for the Royal College of Art, Drona describes her work as "the final cry of our dying physicality in a world that's increasingly more digital and more violent."

Drona describes herself as an intersectional feminist. Her work examines the female gaze and the male gaze. This interest goes back to her adolescence, when the sexualized media culture of the 2000s, exemplified by Girls Gone Wild and the "flash me" trend it inspired in schools, made her fear that her unilateral agenesis would be exposed. She has described her floor-to-wall painting method as "taking the gaze into my own hands again and redefining the body by my own terms."

Influences

Drona has cited Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection as central to her concept of the "abject feminine," and has drawn on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus in her writing on her paintings. The Maison de l'Amérique Latine describes her work as influenced by Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze and as echoing Tracey Emin and Tony Oursler in combining traditional media with new technology.