Ana Benaroya

Ana Benaroya was born in 1986 in New York, New York, and was raised in New Jersey. She earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008 and worked as an illustrator and graphic designer before returning to graduate study, earning an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 2019. She now lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey, where she also teaches.

Her paintings depict exaggerated, muscular female bodies rendered in a graphic, high-contrast style that draws on comic-book caricature, bodybuilding imagery, and art-historical references from Michelangelo to Peter Saul and Tom of Finland. The work engages directly with queer desire, the male gaze, and depictions of femininity as strength rather than fragility.

Early solo exhibitions took place at Postmasters Gallery, Rabbithole Projects, and Ross + Kramer Gallery, followed by a 2019 solo show at Richard Heller Gallery in Los Angeles and a 2020 solo exhibition, The Softest Place on Earth, at Ross + Kramer Gallery in New York. Her gallery representation expanded to Venus Over Manhattan and Carl Kostyal in Stockholm, with a recent solo presentation including Beneath the Paper Moon (Kostyal, 2022). In 2025 and into 2026 she held her first major institutional solo exhibition, Eternal Flame, at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, and Baldwin Gallery has listed a further solo exhibition for 2026. She received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 2024, and earlier held residencies at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy (2020), the Newark Print Shop (2017), and Light Grey Art Lab in Iceland (2015).

Benaroya's work has been the subject of coverage in outlets including Artnet News, generally framing her practice around its blend of comic exaggeration, bodily excess, and queer and feminist reworking of the nude. Peers such as the painter Katherine Bradford have responded to the disruptive, body-forward humor of the work. Institutional attention has followed relatively quickly: her 2025 to 2026 solo exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York marked her first major foundation-level solo presentation, alongside a growing list of institutional holdings that now includes the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Benaroya's auction market is small and recent, consistent with an artist still early in her secondary-market development. The highest price documented for her work is USD 115,920, paid for the painting Be My Baby at Phillips New York on 28 September 2022. Subsequent results at Christie's and Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2022 and 2023 sold in the range of roughly HKD 330,000 to 441,000, notably lower on a nominal basis than the 2022 New York result. Prints and editions trade far below her painting prices; a print sold at Phillips in 2024 for USD 381. Public auction databases record only a small number of total results for the artist, so any single sale should be read as an early data point rather than a stable trend line.

Benaroya's market is young, with a small number of recorded auction results and a wide gap between her strongest painting price and the much lower prices realized for prints and editions. There is no catalogue raisonne, so verification should run through her representing galleries. Her rapid accumulation of museum holdings and a first foundation-level solo show are meaningful signals of institutional interest, but the auction record remains too thin to draw firm conclusions about pricing trends, and collectors should treat any single result, high or low, with caution until more sales data accumulates.