Not many artists receive a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art just five years after completing their MFA.
Yet the 2018 Yale graduate Ilana Savdie has done just that with the opening of Radical Contractions (14 July–29 October 2023) on view in the New York museum's Lobby gallery.
Showcasing some of her latest work, the paintings and drawings draw from her experiences between Barranquilla, Colombia, and Miami, Florida.
Hinting at Barranquilla's Carnival celebrations, fluorescent colours and textures dance and dissolve in and around the canvas. Texturally, she jumps marvellously between thin veils of wash and thick cutouts of beeswax on canvas.
Savdie's attraction to carnivalesque ideas and colour combinations comes from the transformative potential of the celebration, where costumes play a pivotal role.
'I loved the concept of this exaggeration of the body as a form of mockery and mockery as a form of protest', Savdie has stated.
This transformative element can be seen in works such as Baths of Synovia (2023), which depicts a goblin and a one-eyed woman holding down a billy goat attempting to fly. Covering the animal with an ointment, the scene suggests that the goat is in a phase of transformation.Savdie is jointly represented by White Cube and Kohn Gallery.
