Savdie / Soutine: Ilana Savdie and Chaïm Soutine at Norr Cohan

Norr Cohan, at 48 Walker Street in Tribeca, is showing Savdie / Soutine through October 24. The exhibition sets paintings by Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943), a defining painter of the École de Paris, beside new paintings by Brooklyn-based Ilana Savdie (b. 1986). It is the first time their work has been shown together. A century apart, both make the instability of their subjects the substance of the work.

Soutine was born in Smilavičy, Belarus, the tenth child of a poor family, and moved to Paris in 1913. He worked in the émigré community of Montparnasse alongside Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Jacques Lipchitz. Modigliani introduced him to the dealer Leopold Zborowski, who made possible his Céret period and brokered an introduction to Albert Barnes. His thick, agitated impasto and distorted forms favored psychological intensity over descriptive accuracy. He rarely exhibited in his lifetime and often reworked or destroyed earlier canvases. He died in 1943 after surgery for an untreated stomach ulcer, developed while he hid in the French countryside during the German occupation. He is now seen as a key precursor to postwar Expressionism.

Savdie was born in Miami and raised between Miami and Colombia. Her large-scale paintings take up performance, excess, survival and transgression, with fragmented, contorted forms, intense color and uncanny textures. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art ("Radical Contractions") and White Cube, New York ("Glottal Stop"). A 2025 Creative Capital Award recipient, she 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, Centre Pompidou, the Hammer Museum, SFMOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Gestural marks meet gradients, translucencies and surfaces shaped by the language of the screen.

The pairing rests on how each painter treats the body. In Soutine, portrait, carcass and landscape are all subjected to the same turbulence. In Savdie, figure and ground become so unstable that the body and the space around it can no longer be told apart. Saturated color, ruptured contour and deliberate distortion pull the image from likeness toward sensation, and together the works point to a precarious, transgressive form of embodiment that conventional representation cannot hold.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 6. With the show closing on October 24, the remaining days are limited.