To the Core

The entrance to Ilana Savdie’s new exhibition at White Cube New York isn’t just a passage—it’s a confrontation. Visitors must squeeze through a narrow pathway lined with beige and brown latex walls. The slick and disorienting tunnel evokes both birthing canal and horror-movie viscera. It's a sculptural prelude to the emotional terrain ahead, a transition from clean, white gallery space into the unstable, sinewy, corporeal, and often grotesque universe that Savdie has conjured.

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On view through June 14, “Glottal Stop” marks Savdie’s first solo exhibition in New York since her breakthrough 2023 show, “Radical Contractions,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Brooklyn-based artist is known for her hybrid paintings in oil, acrylic, and beeswax—mediums that she applies, layers, and distorts like fleshy matter. In this new body of work, she invites us to consider transformation, resistance, and stasis not just as themes, but as somatic conditions. Paint becomes the body, and the body becomes a battlefield.

“I’m interested in the body as an entry point into the human condition,” Savdie says. “There’s an extreme comedy and horror to the daily experiences of the body, especially as it shapeshifts, makes the unseen viscerally visible, or tries to position itself against its own nature, i.e. the tyranny of the algorithm.” That tension—between attraction and revulsion, comedy and dread—suffuses every inch of the 10 new works on view. Pigmented beeswax protrudes in pustule-like swells; neon paint oozes like radioactive slime. Trompe l’oeil techniques blur with abstract mark-making as circular barbells, chains, and hooks pierce, link, and wind throughout the figures. Across these canvases, bodies fracture, mutate, disguise themselves, or disappear entirely.

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Texture is one of Savdie’s most powerful tools. The beeswax acts like a fossilized gesture, locking movement into place. “There is a seduction and a simultaneous repulsion in materials that feel inside and outside of the body, micro and macro at the same time, at once liquified and fossilized,” she explains. “Not quite understanding what something is can be pretty unnerving.”

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The paintings don’t offer comfort or clarity. While they initially seduce with their luscious colors and exaggerated gestures, the closer one looks, the more unsettling the works become, a reflection of the chaotic state in which we live. Entrails, orifices, parasites, and disembodied limbs emerge from the layers. There are no whole bodies here, no unified self. Instead, Savdie presents a world in flux, a world where identity is something actively negotiated, masked, or resisted.

At the heart of “Glottal Stop” is the titular idea: the bodily interruption that halts the flow of speech. In phonetics, a glottal stop is a muscular contraction in the throat that cuts off sound. In the artist’s work, it becomes a potent metaphor for our current cultural moment, an age of unending crises where action feels perpetually postponed.

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Savdie refers to this state as frantic paralysis, and she captures it with uncanny precision. There is urgency and movement in her mark-making, but also stasis. Much like the frog—an animal that recurs throughout the show in various surreal configurations—her paintings shift between play and death, camouflage and revelation. She references the parable of the frog in hot water: it immediately jumps out when it is placed in boiling water, but when it is placed in water as the temperature gradually rises, it stays complacent until it dies. “It’s meant to be a warning,” she says. “A threat that remains unnoticed, until it’s too late.”

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This metaphor becomes especially chilling when viewed in the context of her broader sociopolitical concerns: climate catastrophe, rising authoritarianism, racial injustice, and the alienating influence of technology. But rather than illustrate these issues directly, her work probes how we metabolize them—or fail to.

This duality, this refusal to resolve, is key to the emotional power of “Glottal Stop.” The paintings don’t offer comfort or clarity, and the installation forces a reckoning with the viewer’s own body. “It tugs at a long art historical thread of biology, decay, impermanence, and the instability of synthetic environments,” says Savdie of the latter. “I think of it as a porous membrane that dissects the clinical white box of the gallery.”

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Still, despite the heavy subject matter, Savdie’s work brims with life. There is humor, absurdity, and theatricality. “The transformative power of performance is a major theme in my practice,” she says. “I’m drawn to things that perform as something else—image, language—as tactics of engaging with power and modes of transgression,” she says. Whether through the grotesque beauty of a painted parasite or the fake promise of a neatly tied bandage, her works perform with bravado, trickery, and wit.

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Savdie’s practice is only expanding. After her White Cube exhibition, she will begin a new project on carnivals, supported by a Creative Capital grant. “It will start with video, which I am new to, but excited to explore,” she shares. The move into time-based media feels like a natural extension of her interest in performance and transformation. In the meantime, “Glottal Stop” invites us to dwell in the space between language and silence, action and inaction, body and image. It is a show that leaves you with a lump in your throat—not because you’re lost for words, but because the words feel like they’re about to surface.

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"Glottal Stop" is on view through June 14, 2025 at White Cube New York at 1002 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10075.