Hide and Seek – Ana Benaroya

Nina Johnson is pleased to present Hide and Seek, a solo exhibition of new works by Ana Benaroya. Across paintings and drawings on paper, Benaroya exaggerates and distorts the female form, creating figures rendered with imposing musculature, saturated color, and theatrical compositions. With a background in illustration and pulling from comic books, art history, and queer culture, Benaroya has developed a distinctive visual language centered on muscle-bound female figures whose stylized gestures and heightened emotional states blur the line between fantasy and self-portraiture. This body of work marks a shift in Benaroya's ongoing engagement with the history of the female nude. Where previous paintings situated their figures within specific spaces and iconographies, these new works center the relationship these women have to their own bodies, particularly foregrounding the invisibility of lesbian desire. For Benaroya, it was also crucial to bring attention to the current political climate's increasingly hostile attitudes toward women and trans people, which for her has sharpened a feeling of alienation: a split between mind and body, a sense of physical selfhood under erasure. Benaroya folds this tension into her figures—destabilizing them, dissolving their edges into light, fracturing them across collaged surfaces. The result is not dissolution but a kind of defiant reinvention. In paintings where flesh dissolves into streaks of light and fractured color, the body becomes unstable, slipping between physicality and cosmic ethereality. In The Bodybuilders, two women converge on a third woman in a charged atmosphere of golden light. In My Body Keeps Changing My Mind, Benaroya stages an intimate rupture: a head floats in space, obscured by a disembodied hand, while shifting surfaces suggest psychic fragmentation and transformation. Contradiction and paradox undergird Hide and Seek. Benaroya's figures are at once powerful and uncertain, larger-than-life and emotionally exposed. The artist has described many of these women as extensions of herself—imagined bodies capable of inhabiting forms of confidence, agency, risk, and physical freedom unavailable in everyday life. Through them, the exhibition constructs a world where desire, alienation, performance, and self-invention coexist.