Savdie / Soutine

NORR COHAN is pleased to present Savdie / Soutine, an exhibition bringing together two artists separated by a century yet united by an unrelenting investigation of the body in states of flux. The exhibition stages an unprecedented dialogue between Chaïm Soutine's torqued portraits, trembling landscapes, and visceral still lifes and Ilana Savdie's chromatically saturated, polymorphous anatomies.

Rather than privileging one perspective over the other, the presentation reveals how both painters—working from radically different contexts and visual languages—mobilize fevered color, ruptured contours, and deliberate distortions of form to probe the unstable, transgressive nature of embodiment. Seen in concert, their works illuminate a shared pursuit: to access psychic, corporeal, and political intensities that exceed the confines of conventional representation, situating each within a lineage of expressionist inquiry that remains continually urgent.

A parallel thread examines how each artist contends with the mutable identity of painting itself. Working within the interwar milieu of the École de Paris, Soutine channeled the anxieties of modernism through an impasto whose tactile volatility asserted painting's material autonomy even as it clung to the residues of figuration. Working with thick, agitated brushwork and distorted forms, he developed a highly charged visual language that pushed representation toward psychological intensity rather than descriptive realism. He balanced his urgent and immediate pursuit of capturing energy and movement with a learned dexterity of palette and light.

Savdie, navigating the legacies of abstraction, postmodernism, and the digital turn, extends this interrogation—merging gestural mark-making with gradients, translucencies, and surfaces inflected by screen-based imaging, and unsettling the binaries that have long structured the medium: abstraction and figuration, surface and depth, body and image. The resulting painted bodies are never simply seen, but are arranged, opened, dressed, suspended, displayed or performed, caught permanently in the act of becoming something else. In Savdie's hands, surveillance curdles into complicity, implicating the viewer and reorganizing the body it falls upon.

Soutine treated paint itself as inseparable from spirit: carnality and intensity become devotional, energy is caught mid-motion. Savdie traces a parallel collapse, but one turned outward: flesh becomes ornament, bone becomes decoration, wound becomes theater, the body's material doubling as spectacle. Where Soutine's intensity remains interior, Savdie redirects that same knotted charge toward the political and performative—camouflage, masking, and mimicry doing for her what exacting brushwork did for Soutine, each artist arriving, through opposing means, at a form pushed past the limits of stable representation. Together, their works illuminate painting not as a static medium but as a perpetually contested site—one in which the pressures of history, identity, and sensation continually reformulate what representation can be, and for whom it can speak.

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, Barranquilla, Colombia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2018 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Savdie’s recent solo exhibitions include Glottal Stop at White Cube, New York (2025); Ectopia at White Cube, Paris (2024); Radical Contractions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023); In jest at White Cube Bermondsey, London (2022); Entrañadas at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Swimming in Contaminated Waters at Deli Gallery, New York (2021); and Loose Bodies at ltd los Angeles / New York (2018). Savdie is the recipient of the 2025 Creative Capital Award and the JFK Terminal 1 Public Art Commission Award. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.

Chaïm Soutine (b. 1893, Smilavičy, Belarus – d. 1943, Paris, France) was a Belarusian-born painter best known for his intensely expressive paintings of figures, landscapes, and still lifes. Born as the tenth child in an impoverished family, he moved to Paris in 1913, where he spent most of his career working within a community of émigré artists in Montparnasse, alongside figures such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jacques Lipchitz. Modigliani introduced him to the art dealer Leopold Zborowski, who facilitated Soutine’s Céret period, which marked a turning point in his creative output, as well as brokering an introduction of Soutine’s work to Albert Barnes. Soutine’s work was rarely exhibited during his lifetime, a circumstance exacerbated by his tendency to relentlessly rework and destroy earlier canvases. Soutine died in 1943 from complications following surgery for an untreated stomach ulcer, which he developed while hiding in the French countryside during the German occupation. Although he remained on the margins of major avant-garde movements during his lifetime, Soutine’s work later came to be recognized as a key precursor to postwar Expressionism and continues to influence painters interested in materiality, distortion, and emotional force in painting.