If Chaïm Soutine hangs up carcasses to dry, Ilana Savdie dissects them with surgical precision. Pairing the Jewish Belarusian and Colombian-American artists seems obvious: Soutine wrestled the turmoil of both World Wars onto canvas, and Savdie melts modern life’s cacophony into oozing creatures of our own making. Coming face to face with their work, I felt a strange mix of alienation and recognition at once.
It’s odd to stand in a New York City gallery amid these chimeras of two eras roiling with violence and uncertainty. The rebellious, frenetic hand of Soutine, who moved to Paris two years before World War I began and went into hiding during the Nazi occupation in 1940, charged his early paintings on view here with static shocks that still have the power to jolt us. In “Hanging Turkey” (circa 1925), echoing his admiration of El Greco, Soutine transforms an unremarkable scene into a portrait of torture. The plucked turkey resembles a decapitated angel, its beak open as if in anguish even after death.
