Galerie Sardine

Alice Mackler, Ana Benaroya, Jane Corrigan, Sylvie Auvray

With Jane Corrigan, Ana Benaroya, Sylvie Auvray and Alice Mackler

Galerie Sardine is thrilled to present Ternura y Fuerza, an exhibition at Academie Conti, in the legendary vineyard Romanée-Conti by invitation of the Consortium Museum, Dijon.  

The show centers around the work of four artists, Jane Corrigan, Ana Benaroya, Sylvie Auvray and Alice Mackler. Their work exists in an interplay of polarities, and can be understood in the tension between brutality and tenderness. 

Jane Corrigan (b. 1980, Quebec, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In Corrigan’s paintings, her subjects—almost always adolescent girls—exist in a liminal space between innocence and knowledge. She depicts scenes of transformation, where nature reflects the inner aspects of self, whether her subjects are immersed in a thunderstorm, sleeping beside their own ghost, or playing by a well with a skeleton. Her work describes a constant, and at times eerie, journey of discovery of aspects of the world—one that often implies an inner death, a letting go.

Ana Benaroya (b. 1986, New York, USA) lives and works in New York, NY. Benaroya’s universe portrays a kind of female utopia, a lesbian paradise. Ana grew up drawing obsessively, inspired by the language of American comics. The arc of the hero and the super powers of its protagonists—almost exclusively, masculine figures and hyper sexualized females as object of their desire. In her paintings, both the power and the gaze is in the female heroines. Unapologetically in love, exuberantly in possession of their bodies, their sexuality and their super human force. Benaroya’s strident use of color further challenges our understanding of traditional notions of beauty and harmony. 

Sylvie Auvray (b. 1974, France) lives and works in Paris. Auvray’s sculptures are joyfully intense, brute and delicate all at once. In her work the artist’s desire of engaging fully with life, both the mundane and the exalted aspects of it, is palpable, even transcendent. Her masks and broom-like beings are totemic, archetypical and at times even a bit goofy. They communicate a kind of aliveness, a spirit of play, a belonging and a being in love with one’s world, the process of inserting oneself into the muck and the pathos of living. 

Alice Mackler (b. 1931-2024, New York, USA) dedicated her life to art making mostly in obscurity. A self described “painter who made sculpture”, she found her audience at 80 years of age, 12 years before her death in 2024. Her ceramic beings, often powerful big-breasted-red-nippled women hold such intense energy. They are Rubenesque, potent beings, tenderly awaiting to be witnessed. Alice glazed her figures with a painterly gesture, leaving behind a small legion of them to pay us gleeful and necessary company. 

— Valentina Akerman

Académie Conti
3, rue de la Goillotte – 21700 Vosne-Romanée 
Opening hours:
May 17, 2025 from 3 to 5:30 p.m. (opening), and two Sundays a month: June 1^st, June 15, July 6, July 20, August 3, August 24 and September 7, 2025.
Free admission.
Académie Conti is a collaborative project between Consortium Museum and domaine de la Romanée-Conti.