“There’s just something about the excess of color that feels like seductive subversion.”

—Ilana Savdie

Painted in 2021, Ilana Savdie’s Imperial diet, y otros demonios seduces the viewer with an intoxicating palette of electric greens, searing magentas, and fluorescent yellows. The canvas glows like a neon sign, drawing the eye in with its flamboyant energy, only to reveal a more disconcerting and grotesque terrain upon closer inspection. Amidst the chromatic intensity, sharply delineated, collage-like forms punctuate the surface—what Savdie refers to as “parasites,” hybrid figures constructed from fragmented limbs, textures, and references.ⁱ These mutant shapes, both human and animal, pulse with discomfort and eroticism. They resist fixed identification, slipping in and out of legibility, and in doing so, evoke the instability of corporeal boundaries and gendered expectations. Through them, Savdie engages in a complex meditation on the body and queerness, proposing that identity is mutable, performative, and always in flux.

Born in Colombia to a Venezuelan mother and Egyptian father, and later raised in Miami, Savdie’s work is steeped in hybrid cultural inheritances. The pageantry of the Carnaval de Barranquilla—a weeklong celebration of inversion, exuberance, and satire that is one of Colombia's most important folkloric traditions and among the largest carnivals in the world—is central to her visual vocabulary. In the present painting, the figure of the Marimonda, a recurring folkloric trickster in Savdie’s work, appears in the upper right quadrant. Defined by its elephantine nose and comically bulbous eyes, the Marimonda traditionally mocks elite authority through absurdity and disguise. By incorporating this figure, Savdie taps into the disruptive potential of performance, blurring the line between parody and protest. Her characters emerge from transgressive traditions of misbehavior, embracing distortion not as chaos but as critique. “The idea of the trickster as an agent of change has always been interesting,” Savdie explains, “and the idea of humor as a mode of resistance. I root in a really queer form of resistance through exaggerating the body—and mimicry as a form of transgression.”ⁱⁱ

 “There’s a celebration of the things that leak out, that spill out, the absurdity of categorization and containment, and boundaries.”

—Ilana Savdie

Savdie’s materials echo this resistance to resolution. In Imperial diet, y otros demonios, she layers oil, acrylic, and beeswax into lush, tactile surfaces that alternate between transparent washes and thick, sculptural passages. The beeswax, poured and left to dry with minimal intervention, introduces an element of entropy and organic decay. The peach-pink and acid-lime sections ripple with wrinkles and ridges, inviting a visceral reading of the canvas as skin—malleable, marked, and imperfect. These textures contrast sharply with the glossy, fluid expanses elsewhere, recalling Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique, yet asserting a materiality deeply rooted in the body.

The title, rendered in Savdie’s characteristic Spanglish, translates to “Imperial diet and other demons.” Though ambiguous, the phrase suggests a critique of colonial consumption—how empire feeds on the bodies it subjugates. Colombia’s colonial history under Spanish rule, from 1499 until independence was gained in 1819, particularly the exploitative encomienda system, looms large in the subtext. Under this system, Indigenous peoples were forced into labor and tribute, and later replaced by enslaved Africans after the Indigenous population was decimated. The “imperial diet,” then, becomes not only metaphorical but literal—those consumed by empire’s hunger. Savdie’s riotous color palette and carnivalesque forms may appear joyous, but they are haunted by histories of violence and displacement. Her work does not seek resolution between these poles but rather insists on their coexistence.

At the lower left, a form resembling a horse’s hoof extends from a cascade of iridescent shapes, while on the lower right, a giant green tentacle coils upward, threatening to engulf. These disjointed, chimeric parts evoke the chaos and agony of Picasso’s 1937 magnum opus, Guernica, held in the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in which humans and animals writhe together in a nightmarish tableau. Yet Savdie’s approach diverges in its embrace of seduction and excess. Where Guernica flattens into grayscale despair, Savdie’s monsters are radiant—defiant in their flamboyance. The grotesque becomes a tool not for horror, but for liberation, allowing the body to escape containment and become something plural, performative, and ungovernable.

Refusing closure or clarity, Imperial diet, y otros demonios stages a dazzling confrontation between beauty and violence, surface and subtext, legibility and slippage. Through her amalgamation of textures, cultural symbols, and embodied forms, Savdie unravels binaries—colonizer and colonized, human and animal, masculine and feminine—not to resolve them, but to revel in their dissolution. Her painting resists resolution. Instead, it vibrates with the possibility that identity is never fixed but always becoming.

Collector’s Digest

• Savdie has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Radical Contractions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2023), Ectopia at White Cube, Paris (2024), In Jest at White Cube, London (2022), and Entrañadas at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2021).


• The artist’s work is represented in prominent museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Jewish Museum, New York; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; and the Burger Collection, Hong Kong.

ⁱIlana Savdie, quoted in Jasmine Wahl, “’Euphoric and Grotesque’: Ilana Savdie on Painting Parasites,” Interview Magazine, December 17 2021, online.
ⁱⁱIlana Savdie, quoted in the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Minisode: Ilana Savdie and Carmen Maria Machado on trickery, horror, and the uncanny,” Audio Archive, Oct 27, 2023, online.