In Tribeca, NYC, Norr Cohan Pairs Ilana Savdie With Chaïm Soutine

At Norr Cohan, 48 Walker Street, Savdie / Soutine puts paintings by Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) beside new work by Ilana Savdie (b. 1986). The gallery calls it an unprecedented pairing. It opened September 10 and closes October 24, 2026.

The show's premise is that two painters a century apart make the instability of their subjects the substance of their work. Soutine, a singular figure of the École de Paris, used thick, agitated impasto and distorted form to pursue psychological intensity over descriptive accuracy; portrait, carcass and landscape all receive the same turbulence. Savdie joins gestural marks to gradients, translucencies and surfaces shaped by the language of the screen, and her figure and ground grow so unstable that body and space can't be told apart. Both rely on saturated color, ruptured contour and deliberate distortion to move the image toward sensation rather than likeness.

Savdie, born in Miami and raised between Miami and Colombia, lives and works in Brooklyn. Her solo shows include Radical Contractions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Glottal Stop at White Cube, New York. She received the 2025 Creative Capital Award and has been commissioned to make a public artwork for JFK Terminal 1. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou, among others. Soutine, born in Belarus, moved to Paris in 1913 and worked among émigré artists in Montparnasse; his work was rarely shown in his lifetime and later came to be seen as a key precursor to postwar Expressionism.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. With the show closing October 24, this week is close to the last chance.