Paula Segarra | HAZEGALLERY

PAULA SEGARRA

Valencia-born artist Paula Segarra develops a figurative practice centred on animals, organic forms and the unstable boundary between instinct and social conditioning. Working across painting and drawing, she creates images in which a single protagonist often occupies a theatrical or symbolic space, allowing the animal body to function less as a subject of naturalistic observation than as a psychological and cultural figure.

Segarra’s bestiary acts as a visual system through which human behaviour can be examined indirectly. Animals become metaphors for primal impulses, vulnerability, desire and aggression, while the spaces surrounding them often operate like stages in which questions of morality, sexuality, death and freedom can be played out. Her work repeatedly brings tenderness into contact with latent violence, allowing contradictory emotional states to coexist within the same image.

Across different bodies of work, Segarra approaches figuration through processes that combine control with unpredictability. In the Free Flowing series, for example, paper is moved across the surface of water and paint, producing abstract stains and channels that are subsequently developed into figurative images. The process allows chance, physics, movement and the unconscious to determine the initial structure of the work before the artist intervenes.

Her wider practice extends from marine and terrestrial bestiaries to projects such as When Pigs Fly and Of a Certain Black Velvet, in which animals become devices for exploring freedom, impossibility, desire and the tension between biological impulse and cultural constraint.

Artist Biography

Paula Segarra was born in Valencia, Spain, in 1986 and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Her practice encompasses painting and drawing, with a particular focus on figurative imagery, organic forms and animal subjects.

Segarra has developed a body of work in which animals operate as both visual protagonists and symbolic structures. Rather than treating them as decorative motifs, she uses the animal figure to examine the relationship between instinct and socially constructed behaviour, often positioning the subject within carefully staged pictorial environments.

Her recent exhibitions include Flying Free at El Corte Inglés Exhibition Hall in Valencia in 2024, Free-flowing with Arte01 Gallery at ESTAMPA in Madrid in 2021, Of a Certain Black Velvet at Iberia Building Exhibition Hall in Cuenca in 2021, Uncovered at Centre d’Art l’Estació in Dénia in 2020, and Free-flowing at Las Rozas Town Hall Exhibition in Madrid in 2018. Her work has also appeared at ESTAMPA Contemporary Art Fair, group exhibitions in Barcelona and Valencia, and numerous national painting competitions in Spain.

Segarra has received several awards and distinctions, including First Prize at the XVI Desideri Lombarte Painting Competition in 2019 and Third Prize at the DESPIERTA Painting Competition in 2020. Her work is represented in the Fine Arts Collection of the Museum of Cuenca.

Practice

Segarra’s practice begins with the animal body as a site of projection. Her figures are often isolated or placed within theatrical, symbolic environments, allowing them to exist simultaneously as individual creatures and as reflections of human behaviour. The distinction between human and animal is deliberately unstable, with instinct, desire and aggression continually pushing against the systems of morality and culture that attempt to contain them.

This tension is particularly visible in Of a Certain Black Velvet, a series that examines how sociocultural structures shape sexual and emotional behaviour. Here, the relationship between artwork and frame becomes conceptual: the frame operates as a border that contains the image in the same way that social conventions regulate instinct and desire. Decorative botanical references coexist with primal imagery, bringing cultivated visual language into direct contact with animality.

Process becomes equally important in the Free Flowing series. Segarra uses water as both material and conceptual structure, allowing the movement of paint across submerged paper to produce unpredictable forms. These stains are later developed into animals and imaginary creatures, transforming abstraction into figuration. The resulting images emerge from a negotiation between chance and control, with the unconscious functioning not as an illustrative theme but as an active element in the formation of the work.

In When Pigs Fly, Segarra approaches the animal figure through the idea of impossibility and freedom. Beginning with a childhood memory of living opposite a pig slaughterhouse, she transforms the flying pig into an image of escape from repetition, production and predetermined outcomes. The project shifts the familiar expression “when pigs fly” away from resignation and toward the possibility of imagining another condition of existence.

Across these different bodies of work, Segarra repeatedly returns to a central question: how much of human behaviour belongs to instinct, and how much is produced by the structures that surround us. Rather than offering a fixed answer, her paintings use animals, bodies and pictorial spaces to keep that tension unresolved.

Selected Exhibitions

2025, Dreamland, Black Light Gallery, Valencia, Spain.
2024, ESTAMPA Contemporary Art Fair, Antoart Gallery, Madrid, Spain.
2024, Flying Free, El Corte Inglés Exhibition Hall, Valencia, Spain.
2024, Depictions, Uxval Gochez Gallery, Barcelona, Spain.
2024, L’age D’or, Valid World Hall, Barcelona, Spain.
2021, Free-flowing, Arte01 Gallery at ESTAMPA, Madrid, Spain.
2021, Of a Certain Black Velvet, Iberia Building Exhibition Hall, Cuenca, Spain.
2020, Uncovered, Centre d’Art l’Estació, Dénia, Alicante, Spain.
2020, Awakening. Woman, Art, and Identity, Museum of Cuenca, Spain.
2018, Free-flowing, Las Rozas Town Hall Exhibition, Madrid, Spain.
2017, Art Fair Málaga, Spain.
2014, Abyssal, Sporting Club Russafa, Valencia, Spain.