ILANA SAVDIE: GLOTTAL STOP

White Cube New York is delighted to present Glottal Stop, Ilana Savdie’s exhibition with the gallery.

May 2 – June 14, 2025

Ilana Savdie’s large-scale, visceral paintings explore themes of performance, excess, resistance and transgression. Her solo exhibition ‘Glottal Stop’ at White Cube New York debuts a new body of work that wrangles with what the artist has termed ‘a frantic paralysis’: a state in which urgency and inaction exist in constant friction. Across these ten canvases, shape-shifting configurations unfurl orifices, entrails and other bodily fragments, reflecting Savdie’s consideration of the self as unfixed and permeable.

Through a juxtaposition of abstraction and trompe l’oeil elements, Savdie overwhelms the compulsion for visual order, tending instead to a proliferation of false realities, identities and narratives that contradict one another. An accumulation of imagery tips into abstraction, whereby the logic of representation gives way under the weight of its own excess. Drawing upon a deception inherent to survival strategies, as well as parasite–host and predator–prey dynamics, Savdie’s paintings refuse stability or categorisation: they mimic, mock, masquerade and play dead.

The artist’s idea of ‘frantic paralysis’ can be understood in relation to the apologue of the boiling frog, which describes the dangers of gradual, imperceptible threat. In the metaphor, a frog placed in cool water that is slowly heated – unlike the one dropped into already boiling water – will remain passive, even as the temperature rises past the point of survival. The artist relates this to our contemporary ‘slow drift’ into extremity and polarisation. When faced with such compound emergencies – of climate catastrophe, racial injustice, rising authoritarianism, rampant misinformation and economic inequality – a sense of urgency is often displaced by paralysis and the inability to act, even in one’s own interest.

For Savdie, however, the symbolism of the frog that fails to notice its own death extends into political, aesthetic, cultural and psychological territory. It signals a state in which crisis has become familiar but is nonetheless fatal; the insidious adopts the guise of seduction; and activism and rebellion collapse into the theatrical.