Ilana Savdie
Painting serves as a reminder that I have a body…I can pervert, rescale, reconfigure, and reroute the paths of power in figures that co-exist intimately on the canvas as contrasting textures, gestures, and colors. I see these gestures as organs, fractured bones, unbound parts that displace the equilibrium of power and dependence.
— Ilana Savdie
Selected Works
Entrañadas
Kohn Gallery is thrilled to present Ilana Savdie’s exhibition, Entrañadas, Savdie’s first solo presentation with the gallery. Known for her surreal and hot-colored, electrifying large-scale paintings, Ilana Savdie’s works contain central themes of ambiguity, the fluidity of identity and the displacement of power through invasion, control, and defiance. Her work manifests and honors dysmorphic human bodies and elongated forms to the brink of near abstraction; it is a formula that beautifies distortion and embellishes the uncommon. By juxtaposing the intimate and the alien, Savdie’s work proposes several questions: What makes such organisms simultaneously seductive and dangerous? How do humanoid forms surrender in obedience and how do they exert authority? When does the familiar end and where does the foreign begin?
As a queer artist, painting for Savdie is beyond categorization - a union of color, texture, gesture, line, and surface, conveying tension as a state of being and exploration of the human body through painterly manipulation and reconfiguration.
Savdie’s paintings recall the lyrical and biomorphic forms of Arshile Gorky, the soak-stained expressionism of Helen Frankenthaler, the flowing wax reliefs of Lynda Benglis, and the raw, contorted bodies of Francis Bacon, yet establishes a truly distinctive voice in Contemporary Art. In a recent interview, Savdie states,
…Our history is inherited in our bones, our cartilage, our diabetes and heart disease, our coded language, our ritual retellings, our inherited dread. Community that finds citizenship in the margins is the invented landscape somewhere between us and them. Shifting identities are intact in their state of flux, forever in a state of becoming. I am interested in the carnage that happens in those liminal spaces where the folkloric and the biological can cohere to propel power for those of us deemed impure, inconvenient, and culturally complicated.
Raised in Barranquilla, Colombia, Savdie moved to the United States as a teenager, yet her work remains inspired by the ethos of the annual Carnaval in her hometown. The ambiance of the Carnaval and idea of resisting societal norms, using the exaggerated body and features of the Marimonda mask (a folkloric figure that originated as a symbol employed to mock the oppressive elite), are all pivotal elements of the Carnaval de Barranquilla and play a role in how Savdie approaches her work. Savdie emphasizes the complexity of the character’s history within the context of Carnaval, a time and place where normative order is suspended and the queering of becoming is better embodied.
Savdie further explains: Painting serves as a reminder that I have a body…I can pervert, rescale, reconfigure, and reroute the paths of power in figures that co-exist intimately on the canvas as contrasting textures, gestures, and colors. I see these gestures as organs, fractured bones, unbound parts that displace the equilibrium of power and dependence.
Selected Press
About the Artist
Born 1986
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
Ilana Savdie was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, FL, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018 and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Savdie was a recent participant in the 2022 Emerging Artist Residency Program at Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles, and was a fellow in the NXTHVN Fellowship Program in New Haven. Savdie is recognized for her surreal and electrifying beeswax, acrylic, and oil paintings which invert traditional associations of figuration and composition. Her distinctive style employs the transformative power of performance as a vehicle to displace control, embrace the grotesque, and dismantle ideas of binary identity relating to migration, foreignness, and familiarity. In 2023, Savdie presented her first museum solo exhibition, Radical Contractions, at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Savdie’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Montréal, QC, Canada; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; and The Burger Collection, Hong Kong; among others.