Laurina Paperina Solo Show

The gallery in Shanghai is proud to host young Italian artist Laurina Paperina’s first solo show in China. As the newest big hit in Europe, it is time her work is finally shown in China. Laurina Paperina has demonstrated her sense of wit, and her unique and much needed sense of humour. Laurina Paperina uses the tools of her generation - humour and immediacy. Her animations gives life to ironic protagonists such as superheroes, and enjoyable characters like space frogs. They are simple subjects but extremely powerful.  Symbolically, she creates a new language; the visual language of the next generation. As she herself puts it, it's all about “The heroes that we loved when we were young (…) somewhat fatter and with some white hairs relentlessly appearing here and there.”

Paperina's characters penetrate the world of comics like a virus – lethally. Yet at the same time, they are friendly. These are not all, she adds, invented "knock-off" superheroes of genuine comic book characters. She is playing  with fiction within fiction, and creating a strongly ironic and sometimes childish character to a genre that has often taken itself too seriously.

In her drawings phrases appear in Pidgin English, corrections and crossed out words make the texts suitable for an international public, distorting names of famous heroes (Plastic Man becomes Spastic Man, for example). Paperina's light-heartedness allows her to openly express the difficulty in communicating a cultural reality which is certainly already familiar.

Over the years, superheroes have had to face "super-problems", most which represent the principal fears of post-modern society. In this regard, the ready made of Duchamp, the famous works masters of pop such as Warhol and, above all, Lichtenstein, and the chaotic and information-overloaded universe represented in the paintings of Haring and Basquiat, post-modern society looks inside itself.

Just like writing a text message, Laurina Paperina’s work is a reflection of new means of communication, short yet striking, and always getting straight to the point.

Despite her young age, Laurina Paperina has shown in Paris, Madrid, Wien, Stockholm, Roma, Napoli, Padova, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Tokyo, and more, and in major institutions around the world: Fondazione Cà La Ghironda (IT) ; Hunterdon Museum of Art (USA); Fondazione Bartoli-Felter (IT); Castel Sant’Elmo, (IT); Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Cavalese (IT); Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea, castello Colonna di Genazzano (IT); Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea (IT); Fondazione Janco Dada Museum (Israel); John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, (USA); Museo Madre, Napoli (IT).