Ana Benaroya: Follow The Nun’s Litany (2024)
Price AUD$3750.00 | Limited Edition Price CAD$3500.00 | Limited Edition Price £1950.00 | Limited Edition Price €2350.00 | Limited Edition Price USD$2500.00 | Limited Edition Price T2500.00 | Limited Edition
Artspace is pleased to present a bold new limited edition of 40 silkscreen prints by Ana Benaroya, entitled The Nun’s Litany. Radiant and electric, The Nun’s Litany flips classic portraiture on its head with acidic color and a muscular, confident woman nude. Benaroya builds upon her childhood love of graphic novels and action figures as well as her mastery of illustration to create a new queer universe in her vibrant paintings and prints. Each series of work centers on specific themes, but their subjects are always robust, raucous women in the nude who project brute strength and power.
“Bright vibrating colors really bring me joy. Playing with color brings me joy. When I see a work of art that has the most perfect color harmonies or color dissonance it literally makes my heart skip a beat in excitement.” —Ana Benaroya The Nun’s Litany pays homage to indie band Magnetic Fields’s song of the same name, animating its imagined central character with personal references to bring her to life.
“I think because I am always depicting nude women there's no way to escape the lens of sexuality…Knowing this, I sometimes embrace it and sometimes try to reject it. Being a lesbian I think adds an additional layer to this because not only am I depicting nude women, which has a huge art historical precedent, but I am also depicting aspects of my own desire. I am both trying to free the woman nude from the weight of all this historical (and contemporary) imagery - and also impart my own vision or desire onto it.” — Ana Benaroya
Edition of 40
This work is signed and numbered on the front by the artist.
13-color silkscreen with glitter layers
Size is 16.00 x 12.75 in or 40.6 x 32.4 cm
Ana Benaroya’s (b. 1986, New York, NY) work centers substantial female subjects, whose extravagant musculatures upset more traditional expectations of femininity. Through her paintings and works on paper, Benaroya constructs a female gaze that recasts women in dominant roles, with an assertive, idiosyncratic presence. The muscles on Benaroya’s figures both distort and ornament her subject’s bodies, and speak to female desire and a queer sensibility. Striking, offbeat colors dominate the compositions, and the artist’s intense, slightly macabre palette balances their figurative vigor and allure.
In her practice, Benaroya pulls from diverse sources to assemble a unique pictorial language. She cites gallery artist Peter Saul as a major inspiration, and her work often makes reference to graphic styles familiar from superhero comics. Her current exhibition at the gallery centers on images of women in relation to water, and through references to sources both art historical and contemporary, Benaroya explores the dynamics of queer desire, in which bodies are on display for themselves and on their own terms. In compositions animated by complex networks of attraction, Benaroya makes visible forms of lesbian desire that are typically rendered latent or invisible.