Nicolina Morra (b. 2003, New York) is an artist whose oil paintings investigate longing as a central and persistent force within the human experience. Rooted in a sense of disillusionment with contemporary conditions, her work examines how the desire for unattainable ideals often manifests as a search for meaning through secular forms of worship-where power, devotion, and belief are projected onto figures, rituals, and objects. Through this lens, Morra explores how longing operates as a quiet pursuit of transcendence within everyday life.
Central to Morra's practice is the recontextualization of imagery drawn from an expanding personal archive. This archive includes stills from cult cinema, fragments of contemporary popular culture, and found photographs of anonymous individuals. These source images, already laden with cultural and emotional residue, are disrupted through selective cropping, compositional isolation, and a blurred painting technique that destabilizes their original context. In doing so, Morra transforms familiar imagery into something distant and reverent-simultaneously intimate and unreachable.
Her paintings often juxtapose softened, obscured figures with moments of hyper-realistic detail, creating a tension between clarity and elusiveness. This interplay mirrors the psychological space of longing itself: the feeling of being perpetually close to something desired, yet never fully arriving. What is rendered sharply becomes an object of fixation, while what dissolves into blur recedes into ambiguity, reinforcing the emotional distance embedded within the work.
Morra situates her practice between two symbolic poles: the archive and the altar. The archive functions as a repository of collective memory and shared imagery, while the altar becomes a site where these fragments are elevated-imbued with devotion, desire, and symbolic power. Through painting, Morra transforms secular images into contemporary icons, examining how belief systems persist even in the absence of formal religion.
Across her work, Morra offers a meditation on devotion, disillusionment, and the human impulse to seek meaning beyond the material. Her paintings do not resolve longing, but rather sustain it-holding space for ambiguity, reverence, and the quiet ache of wanting something just beyond reach.