Art
Maxwell Raab
Portrait of Ilana Savdie. © Ilana Savdie. Photo: Mara Corsino. Image courtesy of White Cube.
Ilana Savdie is an archivist. Wherever she goes, whether for business or vacation, she can’t help but document the world. Horror movies, Italian cathedrals, wrestling stills, baroque sculptures, and digital culture images are among the inspirations captured in the thousands of screenshots in her notebooks and camera rolls. To create paintings in her Brooklyn studio, Savdie distills these influences into fluorescent, chaotic canvases where the distinction between low art and high art dissolves.
“An important way I connect to the world is through images,” the artist told Artsy. “It’s a democratization—a non-hierarchical way to approach high and low, a flattening of [of] “I didn’t understand how important they were to me,” she says. Once these references are “flattened” in her mind, she imagines them “colliding” while drawing in a sketchbook or painting on canvas. She combines these disjointed elements to create striking, unified paintings. The resulting expressive works are unsettling and mesmerizing, evoking the uncertainty of the world we live in, and will be on display in the “Dystopia” exhibition at White Cube in Paris until July 27.
Ilana Savdie, installation view of “Ectopia” at White Cube Paris, 2024. Photo: Thomas Lannes. Copyright the artist and White Cube. Image courtesy of White Cube.
Savvy quickly rose to prominence after earning her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018. She first broke through with a solo show at ltd Gallery in Los Angeles in 2019, followed by solo shows at Michael Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles and Deli Gallery in New York in 2021. Riding on this momentum, Savvy exhibited her work for the first time at White Cube Gallery in London in 2022. In July 2023, a solo exhibition, “Radical Contraction,” was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, indicating that the wider art world was taking notice of her work.
Savidi grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, and credits much of her early influence to the city’s famous Carnivalthe second largest such celebration in the world. As a child, she watched the streets come alive with colorful parades. Participants wore extravagant and often ridiculous costumes, such as the popular phallic Marimunda The mask, an elephant and monkey figure, was meant to mock the oppressive elite. These early experiences would ultimately have a huge influence on her work, which is fully reflected in the bold, expressive use of color in her large-scale paintings.
Ilana Savidi Impression of the hole2024. © The Artist. Photo: Lance Brewer. © White Cube. Courtesy of White Cube.
Her work has always been concerned with the way identity is represented and understood in culture. In addition to carnival masks, she has drawn inspiration from everything from images of wrestling figures, historical prints by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka, and the choreography of war scenes in movies. These references are somewhat recognizable in her paintings, but also distorted, such as Desperate Glory Spine Detachmentreminiscent of a clash between wrestlers, or In your great old sorrow, that is my home (all works 2024), the painting distills abstract forms into a mask-like head. For Savdie, the interest in masks relates to her own queer identity and the community’s association with secrecy and performance. For centuries, queer people have been expected to be openly submissive and therefore present a homogenous identity within a supposedly heterosexual society.
“I think a lot about the unique experience of being queer and simultaneously coded and exposed,” she said. “Performing is both a masking and an act of shedding an armor/skin/shell that can be both protective and oppressive.”
Ilana Savdie, installation view of “Ectopia” at White Cube Paris, 2024. Photo: Thomas Lannes. Copyright the artist and White Cube. Image courtesy of White Cube.
In Heterotopia, Savidi focuses on two key dichotomies. The first is the one between vulnerability and strength, which she discussed with Moran Schelleger, who wrote an essay for the exhibition titled “Ilana Savidi’s Shadow Body.” “We were talking about heroes and their emergence in the spectacle of war. What does it mean to protect, to be authentic or watered down? A lot of these works reference the protective shell of a crustacean, but also the decadent armor of a warrior,” Savidi explains.
The second is the difference between chaos and order. Scattered signal of Homo erectuschaotic elements such as swirling colors and fragmented shapes are arranged to create an underlying sense of order. This oscillation between form and frenzy represents how we see ourselves, a perception that is always changing.
In addition to the large-scale paintings, Dystopia also features six pen drawings. For many years, the artist has planned his works directly on the canvas. In 2020, the artist reintroduced drawing into his creative process as a way to develop connections with ideas in his archive of images. “Drawing is a way to move away from reference images and feel the sensations first – just immerse yourself in the connection between yourself and something in your memory,” Savidi said.
Portrait of Ilana Savdie. © Ilana Savdie. Photo: Mara Corsino. Image courtesy of White Cube.
These works on paper, such as the frenetic pen drawings Hobby Horsealways unfinished, stands out among her large paintings in the exhibition. These paintings are exhibited together in “Heterotopia” and she hopes that the audience will be able to find the connection between her small paintings and large works independently. For example, this painting Paper PlaneMarked by clashing rainbow hues of green, pink, purple and orange, it seems to resemble the Hobby Horse.
When she actually begins painting, she begins by pouring pigment and melted beeswax onto the canvas and watching them move “slowly” across it. She then cross-references her paintings with her archive of images. “It becomes a response to the decisions I made in the sketches and the decisions made by the materials on the canvas. In that interplay, I find the final form,” she says. From there, painting is a process of balancing her various influences, references, and sketches.
Ilana Savdie, installation view of “Ectopia” at White Cube Paris, 2024. Photo: Thomas Lannes. Copyright the artist and White Cube. Image courtesy of White Cube.
The word “ectopic” itself is a medical term used to describe an organ or body part that is in the wrong position, and it gives us a clue to how Savdie sees her work – images that would not normally go together are manipulated into unrecognisably familiar images. For example, a hand glimmers among the abstract forms Holy Smile.
“The work is in that fine space between seductive and repulsive,” Savidi says. “Sometimes that’s through the subject matter, sometimes it’s through the materiality and that uncanny thing that’s both familiar and strange at the same time.” For Savidi, this feeling of being in between is her primary motivation, a sign that she’s on the right track: “It’s oscillating between two things, never quite resolving anything. That feeling is what drives a lot of my work.”
Maxwell Raab
Maxwell Rabb is a staff writer at Artsy.
