Artist Talk

The Body of Work: Ilana Savdie & Celeste Marcus in Conversation
Saturday, October 24, 2026 | 3–5 PM

Please join us at 48 Walker Street for a conversation between artist Ilana Savdie and writer Celeste Marcus, author of the first English-language biography of Chaïm Soutine, to celebrate the final days of Savdie / Soutine.

This event is free and open to the public.

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986) was raised between Barranquilla, Colombia, and Miami, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her chromatically saturated paintings draw on carnival, performance and the politics of visibility to picture bodies in constant transformation, combining gestural mark-making, beeswax and imagery shaped by screens. Her recent solo exhibitions include Glottal Stop at White Cube, New York (2025), and Radical Contractions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2023). She received the 2025 Creative Capital Award, and her work is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Celeste Marcus is a writer and the managing editor of Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, which she helped found. She is the author of Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art (PublicAffairs, 2025), the first English-language biography of the painter. It follows Soutine from his childhood in Smilavichy, near Minsk, to Montparnasse and through his final years in hiding during the German occupation. Booklist called the book "electrifying and zealously corrective," and Simon Schama described it as "transformative." Marcus studied intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Washington, D.C.