Norr Cohan presents Savdie / Soutine, an unprecedented exhibition pairing paintings by Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) with new paintings by Ilana Savdie (b. 1986). Separated by a century, both painters make the instability of their subjects the substance of their work.

One of the singular painters of the École de Paris, Soutine has come to be regarded as a pivotal figure in the passage from early modernism to the gestural painting of the postwar years. Working through the anxieties of the interwar period, he channeled them into an impasto whose physicality asserted the material autonomy of painting even as it held to the residues of figuration. With thick, agitated brushwork and distorted form, he pursued psychological intensity over descriptive accuracy, an energy and movement made immediate and carried by an instinctive feeling for color and light.

Savdie is considered among the most inventive painters of her generation, navigating the legacies of abstraction, postmodernism, and the digital turn, joining gestural marks to gradients, translucencies, and surfaces inflected by the language of the screen. In doing so, she unsettles oppositions that have long structured the medium—between abstraction and figuration, surface and depth, body and image. The bodies Savdie paints are never simply seen but arranged, opened, dressed, suspended, displayed, or performed, held permanently in the act of becoming something else.

For Soutine, a single pictorial force overrides the distinctions of genre, subjecting portrait, carcass, and landscape alike to the same turbulence. For Savdie, figure and ground grow so unstable that the body and the space it occupies can no longer be distinguished. Both artists employ saturated color, ruptured contour, and deliberate distortion to draw the image away from likeness and toward sensation. Seen together for the first time, their work reveals a precarious and transgressive nature of embodiment that conventional representation cannot contain.