Ilana Savdie
Ecdysis, 2024
Photopolymer Gravure on Hahnemühle Natural 300g paper
unframed: 36.9 x 43.5 cm
Edition of 40 + 5 APs + 1 PP
Signed and numbered
White Cube
£ 1,800.00
Further images
Produced to coincide with Ilana Savdie’s exhibition at White Cube Paris, this editioned print shares imagery with the artist’s painting Cow (2023).
Both painting and edition originate from Savdie’s encounter with Mary III (1974) by the late Susan Rothenberg, who was known for her paintings of horses. Unusually however, in Mary III Rothenberg has rendered an animalistic human positioned on all fours. The primally charged scene, which inspired the crouching central figure in Savdie’s edition, fascinated the artist by its ambiguity between forcible submission and a will to be dominated.
Ecdysis touches upon several major themes underpinning Savdie’s artistic practice, from the monstrosity of in-between states to the pressures of societal expectation and, in the artist’s own words, ‘failure as a performance that articulates modes of dissent’.
As is characteristic of Savdie’s work, the edition melds figuration and abstraction; the creaturely protagonist can be seen to dissolve through areas of dense mark-making, a realisation, perhaps, of the power of self-degradation. Savdie further suggests the notion of corporeal excess through rendering the image in a deep, visceral shade of Geranium Red ink.
White Cube
Stand S7
Stand S7
11
of
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