Brooklyn-based contemporary artist Ilana Savdie creates intoxicatingly fluorescent paintings that reflect the various facets of her identity, including her queerness and Colombian heritage.
Read MoreBorn in 1986, Ilana Savdie grew up in Barranquilla, Colombia, before moving to the United States in her adolescent years where she lived in Miami.
In 2008, Savdie received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She later returned to study an MFA at Yale University in New Haven, graduating in 2018.
Savdie's work portrays a dissonance between the beautiful and grotesque, between seduction and repulsion. Her oeuvre is founded in ideas of the body: its exaggeration, fragmentation, and presentation.
Using acrylic, oil, and beeswax, Savdie's paintings combine figuration and abstraction, creating what the artist identifies as 'parasites'. Her carefully rendered paintings emerge from a considered process that includes drawing digital collage, before working with materials on the canvas. The use of beeswax poses a challenge of power and control: as it sets, the beeswax causes the medium to appear with a wrinkly, skin-like texture.
Savdie looks to her own identity for inspiration, in particular her experience of Carnaval. Growing up in Barranquilla, she experienced one of the largest carnival celebrations in the world, teeming with folklore, tradition, and colour.
Savdie is especially interested in Carnaval as a site for transgression, subversion, or mockery, and explores these themes in relation to queerness. This is represented in her depictions of the mask of the Marimonda, an elephant-monkey hybrid character with a long, phallic nose. The artist's use of vibrant colours reflects the cultural influence of the intersections of Carnaval and queer spaces.
Savdie was awarded the Horizon Art Foundation residency (2022); NXTHVN Fellowship, (2020); TOY Foundation Fellowship (2020); Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson (2018); and the HP Blended Reality Grant, Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts (2017, 2018).
Ilana Savdie has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include In jest, White Cube Bermondsey, London (2022); Entrañadas, Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Swimming in Contaminated Waters, Deli Gallery, New York (2021); Loose Bodies, ltd los angeles, New York (2019); and GWP (Gift With Purchase), Stream Gallery, Brooklyn (2015).
Group exhibitions include Abstract Vocabularies: Selections from the Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), San Diego (2021); THIS IS AMERICA, Kunstraum Potsdam, Potsdam (2021); ec.dy.sis, Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp (2019); Backyard Biennial, Brooklyn (2017); and B3 Biennial, Frankfurt (2017).
Savdie's work is represented in collections throughout the United States and internationally, including in the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Danjuma Collection, London; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; and Burger Collection, Hong Kong.
In 2022, White Cube announced their representation of Savdie, beginning with the solo exhibition In jest (2022) at their Bermondsey gallery in London. This marks the artist's first solo exhibition outside of the United States.
Ilana Savdie's website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Rachel Kubrick | Ocula | 2022
