“My process is very organic,” Ilana Savdie tells me from her studio. “It’s a constant, unceremonious thing.” The abstract artist, known for her kaleidoscopic paintings combining oil, acrylic, and beeswax—a material that allows her to build layers of texture—was in the midst of putting the final touches on the works that will make up her solo show at White Cube, opening May 2 in New York.
Surrounded by paint, brushes, and sheafs of source material (including scribbled Post-it notes, images of microorganisms, and other ephemera), Savdie’s studio is filled with a mélange of vibrant colors and shapes that relate to the body. Raised between Barranquilla, Colombia, and Miami, the painter pulls inspiration from near and far: poring over books on anatomy and the Baroque movement, studying the fleshy sculptures of contemporary artist Paul Thek, and hanging screengrabs from horror films and old cartoons on her studio walls.
Each painting—not least those she’ll be including in the upcoming show—is filled with visual obscurities. “I’m interested in things that are slipping in and out of legibility,” the artist says. “I don’t want a finalized mode of representation in my work. I want it to be in a constant state of becoming.”
Rather than expressing fully articulated ideas, Savdie thinks of verbs when she works: peel, gestate, flop. Her paintings serve a purpose: to understand “ever-shifting environments that make up a tenor of collective consciousness,” as she puts it. “That’s the driver behind any new body of work—responding to something urgent, which may be a low-lying frequency I can’t quite name.”
Savdie grew up immersed in the trappings of Carnival—references to the celebration’s theatricality and rituals of performance appear often in her practice. With her latest body of work, Savdie explores performance of—and with—death, specifically how “playing dead or playing with dead things relates to tactics of survival and our relationship to artifice,” she explains. “I’m always thinking about where one derives power. How does power emerge from performativity, whether that’s through camouflage or exaggeration or stillness?”
In the works she plans to show at White Cube next month, references to the body—animal, human, or both—abound. Take Revenge Fantasies, 2024, which bristles with organic forms: A red sack appears ripe with blood and a bone seems to fill a socket.
In the body, Savdie finds a heightened sense of tension. “My paintings oscillate between many things—the sensual and the grotesque, pleasure and horror, desire and disgust,” she says. “They’re always being pulled in one direction or another.”
