A captivating exhibition at White Cube New York marks Ilana Savdie’s debut, featuring a metamorphosis of abstract bodies and biomorphic forms that probe visual and emotional points of tension.
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.
The Body as a Site of Simultaneities
Savdie begins with intuitive sketches and rough graphite drawings that probe visual and emotional points of tension. Her saturated hues and shifting textures emerge organically through a process guided by intuition, rendered in oil, acrylic, and beeswax. The existential experience suggested by her work is about something built from flesh, the nervous system, and the body as an object encountered as fact, place, and event.
Power Dynamics and the Body
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. Her paintings resonate with the Deleuzian notion of the “body without organs”—a field of potential not organized by fixed systems or hierarchies.
Dismemberment as Liberation
In Savdie’s works, dismemberment 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. Her paintings resist individuation and any pre-codified form, instead revealing themselves as rhythmic explorations of endless morphing and mutation.
The Realm of Representation
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.” The show exists in a state of perpetual flux, forever evolving, mutating, and regenerating from and around a primordial gene.
A Space of Conflict and Transformation
The artist 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. The show is a space of conflict and transformation, centered around a massive form that is both an obstruction and a portal.
The Absurd Clinic
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. Her use of pink latex curtains and other materials creates an absurd clinic, where bodies and spaces collide in a tension between containment and obstruction.
A Multilayered Dimension of Reality
“Ilana Savdie: Glottal Stop” is on view at White Cube New York through June 14, 2025. The show invites the viewer to enter a multilayered dimension of reality, where life, death, creation, and destruction coexist in a state of perpetual flux. It is an experience that challenges our understanding of the body, power dynamics, and the realm of representation, offering a glimpse into a world where transformation and regeneration are the only constants.
