Painters Chaïm Soutine and Ilana Savdie never met. In fact, their lives didn’t overlap at all—Soutine died in 1943, more than four decades before Savdie was born. Biographically, they have little in common other than a shared profession. The Belarus-born, France-based Soutine bridged the gap between figuration and abstraction as part of the École de Paris, while 40-year-old Savdie paints biomorphic color washes, drawing on the technicolor visual language of Colombia, where she grew up.
An exhibition at Norr Cohan, “Savdie / Soutine,” on view through Oct. 24, makes the case that these two artists can benefit from being viewed alongside one another. Among the first shows at the New York gallery formerly known as James Cohan (the space’s longtime partner David Norr assumed sole ownership in July), the exhibition pairs Soutine’s paintings from the years after World War I with a new series by Savdie.
Born in 1893, Soutine moved to France at age 20 to pursue art at the height of a bohemian artistic movement centered around the Montparnasse neighborhood. He befriended and worked alongside such legendary figures as Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, and Amedeo Modigliani, painting landscapes and portraits of the city’s working-class chefs, bellhops, and choirboys. (Although these early works are a less famous part of Soutine’s oeuvre, a selection is on view at Norr Cohan.) Soutine remained practically penniless for much of his early time in Paris, resulting in chronic malnutrition and stomach ulcers that would plague him for the rest of his life. But in 1923, a turning point came when the American collector Albert Coombs Barnes took notice of the artist and purchased more than 50 of his works, catapulting him to prominence beyond the École de Paris.
In 1918, with Paris under threat from German forces, art dealer Léopold Zborowski brought the Jewish painter to Nice alongside Modigliani and the Japanese-French painter Tsuguharu Foujita. In the following years, Soutine drifted through the south of France, eventually settling in Céret. The volatility of interwar Europe inspired Soutine to produce distorted, macabre still lifes of rotting carcasses (such as Carcass of Beef, 1925) and exaggerated portraits (such as Jeune Homme Obliquement Étendu, 1921-22), rendered in a thick impasto style that reflected his interest in the muck of life, from illness to alienation.
Likewise, stories of Savdie’s familial odyssey create the foundation for her art practice: Her mother moved from Venezuela to Colombia, and her father, who is Lebanese and Jewish, was born and raised in Egypt before settling in Barranquilla, where Savdie grew up until the family moved to Miami when she was a teenager. As inspiration for her work—acid-tinged canvases filled with liminal coxae, bones, and tongues—she has cited Carnival, horror films, and Baroque painting. One through line is an interest in the way paint can navigate the thin membrane between beauty and disgust.
While Soutine spent most of his life as a starving artist, only to be recognized for his contributions posthumously, Savdie has enjoyed more swift art-world recognition. Just five years after she graduated with her MFA from Yale in 2018, she earned a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has also shown at the Jewish Museum and White Cube, which represents her.
“I count myself among the endless list of artists who look to Soutine for a reminder of what I need from both the making and the confronting of a painting,” Savdie says. “His work is an experience of something internal and psychological—an emotional depth entrusted to the handling of paint itself. In Soutine, I found an early education in pictorial distortion as emotional intensity. Most importantly, I found an early permission to indulge in what is radically sensitive, unsettling, and seductive—qualities that I continue to metabolize through my own work.”
Both artists create hallucinatory gestural works that evoke human and animal anatomy and draw on a fractured sense of home and history. The exhibition situates Soutine’s work as a precursor to Savdie’s: Soutine’s Brace of Pheasants can be seen as an ancestor of Savdie’s A Most Favored Delicacy, 2026, and the leering vulture-like creature in Savdie’s El Rey Golero, 2026 echoes Soutine’s Hanging Turkey, 1925. When viewed alongside each other, Soutine’s highly expressionistic style—situated between figuration and abstraction—bleeds into the visceral nature of Savdie’s electric gradients.
At the end of the day, Soutine and Savdie both orbit the same artistic question: Where does displacement live, not just in the mind but in the body? And how can paint be used to explore our relationship to the sensual and the grotesque—the elements of life that are difficult to look at, but even harder to look away from?
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