When she was a little girl, Ana Benaroya confesses, she was a huge tomboy. ‘I was obsessed with superheroes, both action figures and from comic books,’ the New York-born, Jersey City-based artist says, smiling. ‘That’s how I learned to draw, copying hyper-masculine bodies. So, my fixation with muscles started young!’
At school, the artist dabbled in art history – ‘my first loves were Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and Greco-Roman sculptures…again, godlike bodies’ – before embarking on a degree in illustration. After working for ten years as an illustrator, she made the decision to study fine art at Yale University. ‘I wanted to translate everything I’d learned in my visual language as an illustrator into the world of painting.’
At Yale, Benaroya began depicting women. ‘I needed to find a way to explore my own experience,’ she explains. ‘I think I’d connected with those male figures because the women in the storylines were always side characters or love interests without much development, and I felt determined to depict women in a way that made me feel empowered by just looking at them.’ This is how she ended up combining hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine traits in a single body. Rendered in a bold and saturated palette, her Pop-cult paintings show nude women with rippling muscles, manicured nails, and luscious locks making music, smoking, and strutting.
For each series, Benaroya homes in on a particular place or theme, and for her solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong, the focus is religious mythology and women as angels and devils. The Devil May Care (2023), for instance, shows a closely cropped image of a woman with doe eyes and a cigarette slung between her lips, Angel of Paradise (2023) a midnight-blue madame rising like a phoenix from the ashes.
Before we say goodbye, I ask Benaroya what she hopes to achieve with her work, and she tells me she’d like to imagine a way for women’s bodies to exist separate from shame, rules, and expectations: ‘For our bodies to be truly ours, and for both women and men – whoever sees the work – to appreciate that in some way.’
Ana Benaroya is represented by Venus Over Manhattan (New York). Her work will be on view in a solo presentation in the Galleries sector at Art Basel Hong Kong.
Chloë Ashby is an author and arts journalist based in London. Her first novel, Wet Paint, was published in 2022.
Published on January 30, 2024.
