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Overview
Communion (Love Me Tender), 2025, Oil on canvas, 46 x 36 cmCentral to her practice is the re-contextualization of images drawn from her expanding personal archive, sourced from films, found photographs, and online forums.
Nicolina Morra is a painter who investigates longing as a driving force in the human experience. She graduated from Florida State University in 2025 with a BFA in studio art and an emphasis on painting. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
In her work, she recontextualises images and disrupts and imbues them with new meanings with her painting technique, often paired with hyper-realistic depictions of other objects. Her work has been featured in several exhibitions in various institutions and independent spaces in the United States, including Latitude Gallery in New York (2026), Allgorithim House, Hollywood (2025), Impossible Currency, Atlanta (2025), LeMieux galleries, New Orleans (2025) and a solo exhibition Ruby/Dakota gallery, New York (2025).
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Works
Nicolina Morra American , b. 2003
Communion (Love Me Tender), 2025Oil on canvas46 x 36 cm
18 1/8 x 14 1/8 inCopyright The ArtistIn Nicolina Morra’s Communion (Love Me Tender), the composition draws on a layered collision of popular culture, collective ritual, and art historical reference. The background depicts Elvis Presley kissing a...In Nicolina Morra’s Communion (Love Me Tender), the composition draws on a layered collision of popular culture, collective ritual, and art historical reference. The background depicts Elvis Presley kissing a fan during a 1970 performance of “Love Me Tender,” a moment that has been widely circulated in recorded footage and can be found on YouTube. In that performance, as Elvis moved through the audience, nearly thirty women took turns kissing him on the lips, producing an atmosphere that oscillates between spectacle, intimacy, and mass participation, framed here as a kind of improvised “communion.”
Morra extends this reading by introducing the image of a communion cup, a symbol traditionally associated with ritual consumption and shared embodiment. This reference is drawn from a publicly accessible, digitized object in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online collection, grounding the work in a broader visual archive of sacred imagery. Through the juxtaposition of Elvis’s staged yet emotionally charged encounter with his audience and the iconography of religious ritual, the painting reframes celebrity culture as a form of collective devotion, where physical gesture, media circulation, and symbolic objects converge into a shared act of meaning-making.
Provenance
Artist's studio8of 8Biography
Portrait of Nicolina MorraEDUCATION
2025
Bachelor’s in Fine Arts, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2025
- Ruby/Dakota gallery, New York, NY
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026
- Enari gallery, Amsterdam, NL, "Sweet Surrender"
2025
- The New York Academy of Art, New York, NY, “The AXA Art Prize US Exhibition”
- Impossible Currency, Atlanta, GA, “Blue Blue Blue Blue Blue”
- LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA, “So Real”
- Working Method Contemporary, Tallahassee, FL, “Everything I’ve Ever Known”
- Point Blank, Chicago, IL, “Slipcover”
- Venvi Art Gallery, Tallahassee, FL, “Locust Technician”
- Bascom Centre for the Visual Arts, Highlands, NC, “Emergence”
- Field Projects, New York, NY, “Echo Locator”
2024
- Art Centre Sarasota, Sarasota, FL, “Trompe L’oeil”
- Jag Gallery, Key West, FL, “Small Works”
- Phyllis Straus Gallery, Tallahassee, FL, “Reserves”
- La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, “Everything But the Kitchen Sink”
- Thomasville Centre for the Arts, Thomasville, GA, “THOM Collective”
- Gadsden Arts Centre & Museum, Quincy, FL, “Bite From the Apple”
2023
- William Johnston Building Gallery, Tallahassee, FL, “Paracosm”
- Phyllis Straus Gallery, Tallahassee, FL, “Flowing Substances”
2022
- Phyllis Straus Gallery, Tallahassee, FL, “Art From the Home”
AWARDS & HONORS
2025
- AXA Art Prize Finalist
- Honors, Scholars, & Fellows Excellence in Visual Arts Award
- Career Preparation in the Arts Fund Scholarship
2024
- Mary Brown Ostlund Award
- Bess H. Ward Honors Thesis Award
- IDEA Grant Undergraduate Research Award
PRESS
2025
- Serena Hanzhi Wang, “Precise, Controlled Weirdness at Ruby/Dakota”, Cultbytes
Karla Menendez, “This Is the One With Magic”, Primary Colors Substack
ExhibitionsContact FormSend me more information on Nicolina Morra
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