Ilana Savdie

Savdie was born in 1986 and raised between Barranquilla, Colombia and Miami, Florida; sources give slightly different specific birth cities, so that detail is treated here as unresolved. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018. Her large-scale paintings, worked in oil, acrylic, and beeswax on canvas, draw on the costuming and disguise of the Carnaval de Barranquilla to explore transformation, camouflage, and the way power moves through bodies.

Her first solo exhibition in New York was presented with ltd los angeles in 2019. A 2020 to 2021 studio fellowship at NXTHVN in New Haven and a 2020 TOY Foundation Fellowship supported the development of her mature body of work, which she showed in solo exhibitions at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles and Deli Gallery in New York, both in 2021. In 2022 she had her first solo show with White Cube, at its Bermondsey space in London. In 2023 the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted Ilana Savdie: Radical Contractions, her first solo museum exhibition, running July 14 to November 5. She went on to solo shows at White Cube's Paris space in 2024 and its New York space in 2025, and is now represented by both White Cube and Kohn Gallery. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Coverage of Savdie's work in outlets including W Magazine, Observer, and Artnet News has centered on the visceral, uncanny quality of her paintings and on her use of Carnaval imagery to stage ideas about disguise, excess, and shifting identity. Her 2023 Whitney exhibition was widely treated as confirmation that a painter still early in her career could carry the weight of a full museum presentation, and her subsequent solo exhibitions with White Cube in Paris and New York have kept that critical momentum going. Because her exhibition history is concentrated in the last five years, critical writing on her work is still accumulating rather than settled.

Savdie's auction market is new and thin, consistent with an artist only a few years into gallery representation. Her current record is USD 228,600, paid for Imperial diet, y otros demonios (2021) at Phillips New York on 13 May 2025, a result that itself broke her previous high of USD 201,600, set by A High-pitched Complicity at Christie's New York in November 2023. The rapid rise between those two results points to strong demand relative to a small number of works appearing at auction so far.

Savdie is an early-career artist: her auction record was set only in 2025, on top of a first record set in 2023, and the total number of works that have reached the secondary market remains small. That makes any single auction result more a data point than a trend, and it places extra weight on primary-market provenance through White Cube and Kohn Gallery. There is no catalogue raisonne, which is typical for an artist at this stage, and her growing museum and collection base, including the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, is the strongest available signal of long-term institutional support.