Nicolina Morra (b. 2003, New York) is an artist whose oil paintings explore longing as a central engine of the human experience. Her work considers how disillusionment with present realities—and the persistent desire for an unattainable ideal—can lead individuals to seek meaning through secular forms of worship, assigning power to particular figures, rituals, and objects. Through this lens, Morra examines how longing and devotion become pathways toward transcendence embedded in everyday life.

At the core of her practice is the recontextualization of images sourced from her evolving personal archive: stills from cult cinema, fragments of contemporary popular culture, and found photographs of anonymous individuals. By disrupting the original context of these images through selective cropping and her signature blurred painting technique—often contrasted with hyper-realistic depictions of certain elements—Morra creates a charged tension between what is graspable and what remains just beyond reach.

Her work exists in the space between the archive and the altar: the archive as a collective reservoir of memory and imagery, and the altar as a site where these fragments are elevated into symbols of modern secular worship and the enduring pursuit of something more.