Ilana Savdie is seen through translucent, flesh-toned latex curtains in a White Cube gallery space.” width=”970″ height=”728″ data-caption=’An installation view of “Ilana Savdie: Glottal Stop” in New York. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>© Ilana Savdie. Photo © White Cube (Frankie Tyska)</span>’>
A lively metamorphosis of abstract bodies and biomorphic forms takes over White Cube’s New York space this month, marking Ilana Savdie’s New York debut with the gallery since joining its roster in 2023. The exhibition follows the artist’s recent auction high, set last week at Phillips, where Imperial diet, y otros demonios (2021) sold for $228,600. Here, similarly roiling, rowdy tides of exuberant color clash across the canvas, defying fixed boundaries of flesh and sensation, and pulsing with a restless, vital energy.
Savdie’s newest paintings stage a magmatic fusion of forms that defy containment, dissolving the coherence of the individual body in favor of corporeal and metaphysical excess—an overflow that channels a generative force, disrupting any fixed or unambiguous definition. Rather than treating abstraction and figuration as opposing poles, Savdie dismantles the binary entirely. Her practice explores representation as a pathway to abstraction and mark-making as a method of arriving at figuration. “I am dealing with the physics of real space up to a certain point,” she tells Observer. “Then I surrender that physicality.”
While Savdie’s earlier work was more directly tethered to the body—drawing heavily from Baroque and Mannerist traditions—these new paintings shift toward the figure as a state of being, a mode of existence rather than a representation. “I was looking at Baroque paintings and more classical paintings for composition, and that naturally took me to a space of invented worlds that humans could inhabit,” she explains. As her references expanded, so did her intuitive exploration of flesh and matter in flux, reaching into new physical and philosophical realms. “Now it’s about a figure as a state for bodies, but it sometimes is not relatable to the human body at all,” she clarifies. “It extends beyond the human as a limited compositional framework.”
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Born in Miami and raised between Barranquilla, Colombia and South Florida, Savdie draws from a rich constellation of cultural references—ranging from the history of painting and the transgressive aesthetics of queer performance to analytical and microscopic medical imagery infused with the exuberance of her Colombian upbringing and the spectacle of Carnival.
Though her source material varies from work to work—often establishing the different compositional directions each painting will take—Savdie begins with intuitive sketches and rough graphite drawings that probe visual and emotional points of tension. “I’ll start with a raw sketch based on the image, mostly taken from screens, just trying to make sense of a point of tension,” she says. “I start in a much more abstract space, dealing with the composition.” Once an image emerges, she researches its associations and embedded meanings, though most compositional decisions unfold in response to the act of mark-making. “It’s constantly about dealing with the interplay between something intentional and something process-based.”
When transitioning to painting, her saturated hues and shifting textures emerge organically through a process guided by intuition. Rendered in oil, acrylic and beeswax, her canvases oscillate between the visceral and the surface—a fleshy materiality shaped by the heavy viscosity of oil and the thinned, watery flow of acrylic. “I’m interested in having those coexist—neutralizing into texture,” she says. “I like treating painting material in a way that’s reminiscent of a body—something both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, something intimate and alien.” The existential experience suggested by her work, both in the process and its final image, is about something built from flesh, the nervous system and the body as an object encountered as fact, place and event.
Savdie has recently concentrated more on scientific imagery, drawing from both biology and human medicine. “I’ve been looking at different animal behaviors at all scales,” she explains. “Then I access the human body through similar shifts. I’m interested in the microscopic and the macro, playing with how they coexist in ways that contradict physical space and perception.”
Here, she approaches the body as a dynamic field of continual transformation, where the boundaries between interior and exterior are porous, unstable and in constant negotiation. Her paintings resist individuation and any pre-codified form, instead revealing themselves as rhythmic explorations of endless morphing and mutation. In her work, the figure no longer appears as a fixed outline but as a pure event with genders, species and selves in flux.
“It’s kind of my relationship to the ‘thing,’” she tells Observer, meaning the body, the matter and the material of painting itself. “I’m working with something in any given moment that oscillates between being the thing itself, materially, texturally, and also being a metaphor for something else. I’m using the body as an entry point to speak to something absurd that can only be materialized through the visceral.”
This oscillation evokes the Aristotelian tension between form and substance, between hylē (matter) and morphē (form), the raw substance of a thing versus the organizing principle that gives it shape and meaning. In Savdie’s practice, this division collapses: the body is not merely matter waiting to be shaped, nor simply a metaphor. It becomes a site of simultaneities that gathers meaning through presence and relation—what Heidegger would describe as being-there (Dasein), thrown into a world, facing an ever-changing reality and the drama of existence without any final safe meaning or destination.
At the same time, some violence seems to pervade these works: grappling with the agony of being contained and oppressed within the fixed limits of a figure, these entities often rebel, tense and volatile, against chains, hooks and bondage that attempt to direct their movement and evolution, as well as against the painterly membranes that seek to contain them. Exposing the viewer to a moment of heightened tension between extreme pain and pleasure, between sensation and cognition, these paintings unravel not as “a matter of fact,” but as “a matter of being” in relentless evolution to survive and exist.
More specifically, Savdie reveals that she has been looking at early anatomical and medical illustrations for this particular body of work, her images often based on the observation of dead bodies. “I’ve been dealing a lot with themes of death and play in this body of work,” she says, “but I put a magnifying glass to that particular theme with these visual sources. There’s the idea of the body as mere corpse—an inert material deprived of life, reanimated through some mechanism just to prop it up so the illustrator could draw it.”
This obsessively, oppressively containing chirurgical dimension—but also the porosity of body membranes—are both paradoxically evoked and staged in the space with a series of pink latex curtains, a material that, as Savdie observes, carries so much history and at the same time evokes not only interiors but also the exterior flesh and the residues of the body. “Being somehow translucent, they take us to this absurd clinic, while curtains deal and create an additional tension between bodies and the space,” she says. “It both contains and obstructs,” reflecting on how the concept of constraint can also act as protection, as there is often a fine line between the two.
This type of reflection also suggests how Savdie is engaging with power dynamics in her work—the societal structures and infrastructures that, in various ways, contain the infinite potential of body and soul, forcing it into socially acceptable forms. “This show deals with power, particularly how external powers become internalized and corporealized in psychological experiences,” she says. Read through a Foucauldian lens, Savdie’s approach suggests that power not only represses but also produces behaviors and bodily transformations. It produces subjects by inscribing norms directly onto the body—what Foucault called “docile bodies,” bodies that self-regulate, perform and internalize control through repetition and surveillance.
In this sense, Savdie’s paintings resonate with the Deleuzian notion of the “body without organs”—a field of potential not organized by fixed systems or hierarchies (such as the nervous, digestive or reproductive), but rather a site of intensity, flux and experimentation. A de-structured, open-ended terrain where identity, sensation and power are constantly reconfigured.
Taking inspiration from medical science has allowed Savdie to push even further in her exercise of embodiment and disembodiment, dismemberment and spontaneous, erratic re-embodiment staged across her paintings. Here, disjointed, contorted, tormentedly—or exuberantly—uncontainable entities dismantle all binary thinking and linear narratives, not only in relation to gender and cultural identity, but also across species boundaries and the evolving relationship between the human and the posthuman.
In the works upstairs, there is an especially tense dialectic: liquefied forms unfurl across the canvas, even as the slick, flesh-like surfaces conjure limits that might contain their unruly expansion. At times, these forms implode or explode altogether, fragmenting into a parcelization of particles that drift freely across the pictorial space, liberated from form and anatomical logic. Hovering between embodiment and dispersion, these entities inevitably collide with their own limits only to collapse back into primordial matter, revealing themselves as porous, unstable aggregates that erupt into sensorial reality as endlessly mutating images and unstable symbols. Dismemberment, then, is no longer framed as violence, but as a potential act of liberation—an ecstatic parcelization of form and identity that ruptures the illusion of fixity, opening the canvas to embrace the mysterious entropy that governs the cosmos.
Savdie conceives her works as arenas of conflicting polarities—forces that dialectically coexist within the same pictorial space, generating a fertile contamination that nourishes transformation. From this emerges the more fluid, alchemical quality of her compositions, which seem less concerned with representation than with the perpetual generative flux of matter and energy that shapes the cosmos.
One painting upstairs, titled Arena, addresses this directly, encapsulating her reflection on dualities and monstrous ambiguity through a vibrant choreography of color tides that gravitate around a voraciously dense, black central mass.
“I was thinking about the dualities—the double, the extreme polarities—that we’re dealing with in this moment,” she says, explaining how the piece is called Arena because it is precisely that: a space of conflict and transformation, centered around a massive form that is both an obstruction and a portal. “This big central form that is, in its ambiguity, monstrous,” she continues. “The monstrosity comes from existing in between things. What does it mean to have a mirror image of the self that speaks in your voice but tells you a lie? What does it mean for the body and the algorithm to have to push up against each other and deal with that dark matter, which could be just the shadow?”
In this show, Savdie confronts existential questions that echo an anxiety born from the terrifying daily headlines of disaster, injustice and violence. Yet at the same time, she embraces this eternal cycle of life, decay and matter as necessary for renewal and rebirth. There is no light without passing through darkness; even stars, after all, are born from black holes.
This, like other works, ultimately exists in a state of perpetual in medias res, forever evolving, mutating and regenerating from and around a primordial gene. These figures are not simply formed; they are devoured and regurgitated by the realm of representation itself—bewildering, ominous and symbolic manifestations of a state of becoming that already gestures toward a multilayered dimension of reality, of life and death, of creation and destruction, which goes well beyond what our sensorial and intellectual experience can ever fully comprehend.
“Ilana Savdie: Glottal Stop” is on view at White Cube New York through June 14, 2025
