Photo By Gail

Sweeping abstract flows of paint  drench torsos and limbs in Illana Savdie’s Cow (2023), sowing perceptual confusion. The effect on the viewer is placelessness and near-disorientation, which the artist uses to disrupt power dynamics. She allows multiple cultural, contexts and inheritances to simultaneously smash into and balance one another, resulting in entirely new formations.

Her composition also speaks to the beautiful chaos of the Barranquilla Carnival, which takes place in the city of Colombia where Savdie was raised, as well as legacies of the Jewish Diaspora. Savdie’s Jewish family immigrated variously from Colombia, Egypt, Lebanon, Romania, Poland, and Venezuela, as the result of conflict and expulsions, creating, in her words, a “very complicated relationship with the idea of heritage.”

Photographed in the Jewish Museum in Manhattan