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
Exhibitions
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.