White Cube recently hosted the painter’s first solo show in New York since her Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition in 2023 with a series of works about procession and its refusals.
The slippery state between a fleeting moment and one that is sturdily ingrained is where Ilana Savdie quite often finds herself positioned. Between procession and pause, the painter, however, carves a well of possibilities. “The instinct to try to resolve something feels natural,” she tells Elephant, but what she is often confronted by is “the act” of fully resolving a conundrum. The impetus behind the gestural decisions in her disarmingly abstracted paintings, she thinks, is “sitting in that space of in-betweenness.”
For the Brooklyn-based artist, the work—some of which were recently on view at White Cube’s New York space in her solo exhibition, Glottal Stop—stems from “oscillating between the process-based gestures and those that are intentional, almost representational.” It is not surprising that Savdie avoids listening to any music during her laborious exchange with the canvas—her attention cannot afford another art form during the demanding journey in which “perpetual rerouting” of patterns and herself creates paths of “interrupted gestures.”
In March of the Cards (2025), a grotesque abundance sweeps the large canvas with eerily familiar and completely foreign motifs, including a larger-than-life body piercing which attempts to re-unite two split supposed skins. The right bottom corner bubbles with corporal nods in arresting colors; detached and deformed, they settle on a static mayhem against the oil, acrylic and beeswax surface’s otherwise calm composition. Against what Savdie calls “the perpetual buffering mode we exist in,” she orchestrates a “glacial traveling of paint.” Grandiosity and gentleness clash but eventually make a pact while a constant tug-of-war between steadiness and liquidity says the final word. The trompe l’oeil quality of the piercing’s penetration into the canvas is alarming and amusing, tricking the eye with the artist’s command on beeswax and depth. She commands the uncanny with a fleshy immediacy all while not compromising a cheeky salute to any marker of the real in our AI-generated landscape. “I am always drawn to the act of trying to behave as something or someone else, yet not quite successfully so,” she says. The enigmatic notions of camouflage and playing dead echo throughout the show’s both floors.
Play Dead (2025) is a large vertical plunge into a colorful abyss. Like a waterfall, it pours onto the viewer a stream of malleable ends and split borders in almost neon hues. Occasionally hollow and never hermetic, the forms ooze and drip, rerouting into a rib cage or an orifice. Spectral lines zigzag across the surface which yields the allure of an operatic stage where the crescendo is ever suspended. The soprano in fact seems to be speechless, bewildered by the order around.
An often failed attempt to utter a word or a cry indeed meanders across the gallery, like a deafening silence. Savdie’s compositions burst and contain their mumming howls in her erratic handling of figures with a bold outwardness towards the obscure. Bright shades complicate some of the bodily weight that each painting hauls—limbs and organs feel weightless while floating amidst volcanic unknowns. The dead weight challenges the gravity.
Even by a Nation of Devils (2025) holds a fiery fireball effect with its kinetic burst in which various painterly jabs unite in concert. A gold-hued globular form is almost reflective, like a gazing ball in which the enveloping panorama exists on the verge of collapse. Hope blossoms here and there with splashes of soothing hues that slice through a rib cage. Savdie captures a variety of textures across the surface which range from blood-thick to sandy evanescence. Minimalist gestures join arm-wide statements, all united in the middle by another body piercing, clamping the disarray in the thickness of skin. “Are we sitting in a box comfortably or spilling out of it?” Savdie asks. She is still questioning how porous the box’s borders are through constant layering and excavating. “I posit that the borders are made to be constantly challenged.”
Written by Osman Can Yerebakan
Ilana Savdie: Glottal Stop was on view at White Cube New York through June
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