Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions

Ilana Savdie explores themes of performance, transgression, identity, and power in her vibrant, large-scale paintings. Her canvases assemble fragments into finely detailed, fluid compositions that pulsate with flamboyant color. Abstracted forms conjoin, merge, and blend to create riotous excess. At their core, Savdie’s paintings aim to dismantle ideas of binary or fixed identity and embrace performance as a transformative tool. Drawing on a range of subjects and environments as source material, such as the Carnival celebrations that take place in Baranquilla, Colombia, Savdie explores variable textures and forms of mark-making across each of her expansive canvases. Combining areas of stained and blurred color with swaths of thick visible brushwork or smooth, hard-edged marks, she employs acrylic, oil, and beeswax into paintings characterized by their dreamlike illusion yet grounded in the physical body.

The exhibition is on view through October 29, 2023 in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery, a space accessible to the public free of charge.