The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Eternal Flame, an exhibition of new and recent works by Ana Benaroya. With an expansive selection including paintings, works on paper, and monotypes, the exhibition presents the full breadth of Benaroya’s reimagining of women’s bodies as a form where femininity and masculinity coexist, intertwine and transform one another. By referencing both art historical motifs and drawing upon contemporary culture—from music to comics to movies—Benaroya situates her subjects within the ever-evolving discourse around how women are seen, understood and desired.
Benaroya’s exploration of how women’s bodies have been depicted—as both form and idea—has remained the singular focus of her practice. Driven not only by her attention to the long history of representation of women, but also by an attempt to discover whether their bodies can be seen without being sexualized, Benaroya creates superhuman characters whose extreme physical proportions and exaggerated features complicate any normative idea of what femininity does or should look like. Though they flaunt bulging and rippled physiques, her otherwise hyper-masculine figures exhibit stereotypically feminine qualities as well, such as styled hair and painted lips, seductive poses and tender expressions. With these dramatic combinations being filtered through the lens of lesbian desire that structures her work, Benaroya is able to consider the ways that gender presentation is so often rooted in rigid and heteronormative conventions.
Eternal Flame reveals the diversity of Benaroya’s practice by highlighting the continued evolution of her style alongside new thematic forms. In each series and across the different media she works in, Benaroya consistently renders her subjects and the spaces they exist in by using her distinctively bold, graphic and color-saturated approach, one that borrows as much from the world of illustration as it does from painting. Regularly invoking the style of comic books—with their binary emphasis on heroic characters and evil antagonists—Benaroya portrays women that are empowered and without shame.
The exhibition features work from several series, each of which pivot around a reinterpretation of a historical genre or motif that has long been reductively associated with the representation of women. In her Women In Water series, Benaroya examines the impressionist bathers painted by Pierre Bonnard and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the 19th-century, redescribing their subjects as voluptuous and powerful, as subjects full of confidence and presence. Her Women In Cars series references both classic Hollywood films and American advertising, where stylized women are meant to express the futuristic autonomy of the car while also having their bodies conscripted to sell commercial merchandise. In Benaroya’s hands, women make use of the automobile without having either their subjectivity or appearance gifted by the machine. The Women With Flowers works consider the flower a romantic trope tied to conventional notions of femininity. As in Benaroya’s other works, the flower is no longer a gateway to seduction and is instead, like the women that surround them, allowed to be beautiful in its own right.
Assembling work made in different media and at vastly different scales, Eternal Flame underscores the nuance and variation at the heart of Benaroya’s practice. Each medium sees Benaroya representing women’s bodies triumphantly and without inhibition, as her figures appear fully absorbed in their own experience rather than frozen by an awareness of an external, objectifying gaze. At the same time, they contain intimate moments of great tenderness that transcend simple caricature. By imbuing her subjects with interiority and depth, Benaroya suggests that even where gender is both powerfully and confidently expressed, the possibility for expansion and experimentation can still remain.
