Ana Benaroya's works make a noise, as if they are a soundtrack on a canvas. There's something that radiates off the characters, as if we know they have their own music emanating from them. In her cover story with us back in Spring 2020, just as the world was beginning to unravel, she said, "Good music connects to your heart before your brain has a chance to catch up. That’s how I try to make my paintings." In her newest works, The Muse's Gaze, on view with Morgan Presents in NYC until December 17, it seems as if she is truly in a symphony of bold and bright, elegant and rawness, and it's some of her strongest works to date.
Cleverly juxtaposed in the center of the gallery is a wonderful work by British-Nigerian artist, Yinka Shonibare CBE, entitled Diana of Gabii. Just as Benaroya is working on a new idea of figurative painting and subject matter, a "reimagining and retranslating modernist masterpieces through a queer feminist lens," Shonibare's sculpture is a retranslation and reimagining of a historical work: "the late-classical sculpture of the same name housed in the Louvre’s collection." This balance, on the surface a good selection just in terms of color, shows that no matter where an artist is at their career, the ideas of flipping our historical narratives upside down does not go away or our desire to re-examine hierarchies is as strong as ever. —Evan Pricco