Frieze London
14 – 18 October 2026
Dates
14 – 18 October 2026
Location
Stand D21, The Regent’s Park, London
Ilana Savdie
with
John Banting, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Leonor Fini, Nancy Grossman, Richard Hunt, Gustav Klimt, Maria Lassnig, Jackson Pollock, Egon Schiele and Yves Tanguy.
White Cube’s Frieze London presentation will be focused on Ilana Savdie, debuting her new paintings and works on paper in dialogue with artistic forerunners whose practices resonate with her own. Savdie’s vivid canvases will be installed behind an open lattice hung with works by Leonor Fini, Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois and others, forming a physical and metaphorical filter through which to view her work. Bringing together artists who interrogate the human form, the multi-generational presentation reveals the art-historical lineages of Savdie’s work, as well as artists’ enduring fascination with the psychological and material limits of the body.
In this new cycle of paintings Savdie addresses the body as spectacle, whether on exuberant display in parades and carnivals, or splayed in operating theatres for medical study. As changing scientific fashion had it, medical illustrations sometimes favoured disturbingly lively poses, not unlike the animated skeletons of Gustav Klimt or Leonor Fini. This discordance, Savdie notes, has echoes in contemporary visual content in which atrocity, entertainment and advertisement seem to alternate indistinguishably.
Central to the presentation is Louise Bourgeois’s suspended sculpture The Couple (2002), a touchstone reference for Savdie. An image of Bourgeois’s work can be found pinned up in her studio, part of an ever-growing repository of visual references that, collage-like, spread across her walls. From masterworks such as Rubens’ Descent from the Cross (1612–14) and Tintoretto’s Massacre of the Innocents (1582–87), to medical illustrations, stills from body horror films, carnival costumes and nature photography, Savdie’s wide-ranging inspirations extend from art history into both archival documents and popular, visual culture. All serve as fodder for the teeming abundance of Savdie’s compositions, which she translates to the canvas with virtuosic skill, combining washes of paint and diffuse colour fields with passages of expressive gesture, graphic line, trompe l’oeil, illusory textures mimicking fur and flesh, and raised sections of stippled beeswax.
In Savdie’s painting The Harbingers (2026), for example, the three vertical strokes slashing the canvas skewer three bundled aggregations of forms. At once skeletal, elastic and insect-like, this trio is lent mythological significance by the artist’s choice of title. Though Savdie’s harbingers lack human or animal form, they have the distinct bearing of three personages, something also achieved by English surrealist John Banting who imbues abstract forms with the presence of performers on a stage. In A Wild Unclean (2026), a technicolour riot of forms flows through a canyon of dark beeswax with the momentum of a stampede, while a delicate mantid in the foreground preens with indifference to the sublime carnage; the charnel-house of body parts is reminiscent of Dalí and Bellmer’s conjoined forms.
For Savdie, bodies are always political. The dissecting gaze colludes with the authoritarian gaze of surveillance, both imposing order, categorising and restraining. In turn, Savdie’s disorderly bodies and visions of excess imply defiance and resistance. The boundaries of the body are bound to fail: here is leakage, seepage, merger and mutation. Contrasting with the exposed interiors of the body is the suggestion of a complex exterior, elaborate costumes and feats of disguise. In Savdie’s native Colombia, the tradition of carnaval provides a liberating space for protest while its masks and bells mimic the dazzle and distraction of political theatre. Bodies are laid open only to reveal further complexity, while disguises betray hidden truths: like a carnival lord of misrule, Savdie collapses categories and turns certainties upside-down.
Ilana Savdie
A Wild Unclean, 2026
‘My research tends to be located in spaces between the biological and the folkloric. I look to different organisms in nature, I look to human anatomy throughout history and how the representation of the body has changed throughout history.’
Ilana Savdie
The Harbingers, 2026
Ilana Savdie
Hobby Horses, 2024
Ilana Savdie
The Great Compromise, 2026
Salvador Dalí
Scène hystérique d'une femme avec tiroir, c.1937
Louise Bourgeois
The Couple, 2002
‘The artist has the privilege of being in touch with his or her unconscious. This is really a gift. It is the definition of sanity. It is the definition of self-realisation.’
Ilana Savdie
Illness of bronze, 2026
Leonor Fini
Squelette, c.1965
Gustav Klimt
Bekleidetes skelett nach rechts stehend (study for ‘Die Hoffnung I’, 1903/04), 1902
Marlene Dumas
Magdalena (for Kiel), 1995
Ilana Savdie
A Stanchless Avarice That, Were I King, 2026
Ilana Savdie
Lip Lickers, 2026
Ilana Savdie
Prairieland, 2026
Ilana Savdie
Clatter’s End, 2026
Ilana Savdie
Autophagia, 2024-26
Ilana Savdie
Conspiracy of the Barons, 2026
‘The source of my images is scandalous because for me the world is a scandal.’
To speak to a member of our sales team about any of the works in this presentation
Private Viewing Rooms
Frieze London 2026
White Cube presents a selection of works on view in our Bermondsey viewing room and the backroom of the fair booth.
Gallery Exhibitions in London
Gallery Exhibition
Gabriel Orozco
Chronotopic
Curated by Briony Fer
Curated by Briony Fer
16 September – 8 November 2026
‘Gabriel Orozco’s new exhibition takes the form of a travelogue through time and space. Drawing on the artist’s interests in play and games as well as tropes from sci-fi and archaeology, the show travels through different zones to explore the formal logic that holds together the astonishing range of his object-world.’ – Briony Fer
Gallery Exhibition
Firenze Lai
North and True North
13 October – 14 November 2026
Preview: Tuesday 13 October 2026, 6–8pm
White Cube Mason’s Yard presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong), coinciding with Frieze London 2026 and marking her first solo exhibition in the UK.
In her latest works, Lai draws on our ever-increasing time spent online and the continuous development of AI to explore belonging, divisive misinformation and the impossibility of determining a singular source of truth.
Explore our upcoming programme across White Cube’s global galleries
Museum Exhibitions in Europe
View all
23 September 2026 – 25 April 2027 | London
‘Our George Crompton, WORLDS and WINDOWS by Gilbert & George’ at The Gilbert & George Centre
1 May 2026 – Spring 2027
London
Posted: 1 April 2026
22 October 2026 – 28 February 2027 | Paris
8 October 2026 – 18 April 2027 | Humlebæk, Denmark
25 March – 29 August 2027 | Milan, Italy
Create an Account
To view available artworks and access prices.