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

At Norr Cohan, 48 Walker Street, Savdie / Soutine hangs 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 Saturday, October 24, 2026. Norr Cohan is the Tribeca gallery formerly known as James Cohan; Cultured reports that David Norr took sole ownership in July.

The 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 get 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 lean on saturated color, ruptured contour and deliberate distortion to push the image toward sensation rather than likeness.

Works named in the sources include Savdie's El Rey Golero (2026), oil, acrylic and beeswax on canvas stretched on panel, 86 by 80 inches, and A Most Favored Delicacy (2026), plus Soutine's Brace of Pheasants (ca. 1926), oil on canvas, 25 1/2 by 20 inches. Cultured says the Soutine selection centers on paintings from the years after World War I, with a few of his lesser-known early portraits of chefs, bellhops and choirboys.

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, including Chagall and Modigliani. Dealer Léopold Zborowski brokered an introduction to the collector Albert Barnes, who bought more than 50 of his works in 1923. In 1918 Zborowski took him to Nice with Modigliani and the Japanese-French painter Tsuguharu Foujita. 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.