The Importance of Materiality in Art

We meet leading artist Ilana Savdie from her studio in New York to explore the making of her major new solo exhibition at Whitney Museum!

Ilana Savdie explores themes of performance, transgression, identity and power in her vibrant, large-scale paintings. Assembling fragments into finely detailed, fluid compositions, her canvases pulsate with flamboyant colour, conjoining, merging and blending their forms in an aesthetics of riotous excess. At their core, Savdie’s paintings aim to dismantle ideas of binary or fixed identity, and to embrace the notion of performance as a transformative tool.

Drawing on a range of subjects and environments for her source material, Savdie explores variable textures and forms of mark making across each expansive canvas. Combining areas of stained and blurred colour with passages of thick visible brushwork or smooth, hard-edged marks, she employs acrylic, oil and beeswax into paintings characterised by their dreamlike illusion yet grounded to the physical body.

Now living and working in New York, Savdie was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and draws extensively on the city’s tradition of Carnaval in her work. A week-long display of transgressive abundance, Savdie sees the queer potential in the Carnavalesque idea that figures and characters are mutable, with the potential to change at any moment. Connecting this to wider constructs of social and sexual identity, specifically Colombian figures such as the ‘Marimonda’ (a monkey/elephant hybrid with a phallic looking mask), assert an element of the transgressive, exemplifying the disruptive, socially-penetrating mockery at the heart of Carnaval display. ‘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.

The influence of Carnaval extends to the artist’s use of colour, which is instinctual and often saturated in hue, a saccharine palette of pinks, purples, yellows and greens: ‘There’s just something about the excess of colour that feels like seductive subversion,’ Savdie has said. While this colourful exuberance points to a tactical subversion, it also makes reference to established visual tropes: to the representation of sexuality in culture and the bright colours associated with ‘queer space’.

Recalling the colourful abstract works of Helen Frankenthaler or the extenuated figuration of Francis Bacon, Savdie equally draws on the drama of Baroque painting and, more recently, on film. Her work is particularly attuned to the melodrama of horror and science fiction as an entry point into the aesthetics of excess. Using elements and figures that seem violent and other-worldly, pulling from the aesthetics and behaviours of the parasite, she blends the darkly comic nature of caricature with the euphoric and the grotesque.

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, raised in Barranquilla, Colombia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2008 she received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA, and in 2018 she received her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, USA.

Visit Ilana's solo show 'Radical Contractions' at the @WhitneyMuseum now open until 29th October 2023: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/ilana-savdie

Follow @Ilana_Savdie and @WhiteCube

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