The work represents a self-portrait animated video of the artist herself. Her artistic research is based on the re-elaboration of pop culture icons and characters with a distorted twist, revealing a unique "cruel-pop-cartoons" style. Paperina creates infinite loop animations of improbable creatures who populate surreal worlds; In this work the artist portrays a version of herself under the form of a smoking bird while perching on a skull.

Known to her friends as La Pape, she is a creature with a human head and duck’s body, or vice versa.
She studied at the Art Institute of Rovereto and graduated at the academy of Fine Arts in Verona. As a child she wanted to become a Knight of the Zodiac (from the Japanese manga series), but due to her limited athletic abilities she chose the dark path of contemporary art.

Today Laurina Paperina draws, paints and creates installations and video animations.

The themes tackled in her works are a sort of parallel reality to the world in which we live, populated by false myths and legends, where heroes and anti-heroes of our time are revisited ironically and with desecratory features: it is an elaboration that comes about by synthesising the culture that originates from the world of the internet and television, producing a complex set of elements that are transformed into apparent chaos, but allow recognisable forms to be glimpsed; her works are therefore painted irony: dynamic forms and garish colours from a sort of “virtual reality” similar to a videogame, where fiction and appearance play at simulating reality.
The fast, synthetic style of her video-animations harkens back on one hand to the tradition of comic strips and on the other to the great popular phenomenon of US satirical cartoons: in the video series entitled How to Kill the Artists (begun in 2007 and still in continual evolution), she plays with the world of art, narrating the hypothetical death of those artists who have now reached the peak of their success and are acclaimed by the critics, and are killed by their own works.

In her most recent production, the painting acts as the boss. The series of large paintings on canvas entitled Apocalypse Now gives rise to apocalyptic scenes of a surreal reality that nevertheless recalls our own time. The formal composition of these works tips a nod to that fantastic imaginary world present in the works of Hieronymus Bosch, while the themes make reference to the Divine Comedy and imaginary stories populated by mythical monsters and characters stolen from popular culture.

She lives and works in Duckland, a small village located in the deepest Universe.

Laurina Paperina Art Collection