HANNAH LEVY

With spare gestures and skilled execution, Levy manipulates texturally incongruous materials, such as silicone, glass, stone, and polished metal, to create tactile sculptures that provoke sensory experience. The artist appropriates commonplace objects and defamiliarizes them by using unexpected materials and warping their formal properties.

Stretched flesh-like expanses of silicone are held taught or perched precariously on rigid armatures, zoomorphic forms that invite comparison to insect legs, household fixtures, clothing, and exercise equipment. Levy’s recent addition of glass into her material lexicon continues her exploration of the material encounter of two seemingly opposing mediums. A mix of traditional and experimental processes are used to alter, slump, swell and sag the glass as it submits to its metal opponent. Levy makes that which is familiar, deeply strange and magnetic, creating objects that exist in a fleeting limbo of what the artist calls “design purgatory.”

Matching the allusions of 20th century design with fleshy casts, the artist imbues the modernist ideal of immaculate geometry with a jarring return to organic matter, accentuating the pre-existing sensuality hidden in modern design. While her linear, metallic forms draw our attention to the subtle details of construction that mark the mid-century aesthetic, their skin-like sheaths resist this comparison, confusing the separation between living and dead, animal and prosthetic. Levy’s work is indebted to the Surrealist fascination with the uncanny and the abject while taking a retrospective and ambivalent view on the material culture of the past century.

Hannah Levy received a BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (2013), and a Meisterschüler title from Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2015). With recent institutional solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), CA (2022) and the Arts Club of Chicago, IL (2021), the artist has been included in exhibitions at CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the Rennie Museum, Vancouver, Canada; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; among others, and was invited to participate in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2022). Levy’s work is included in public collections including the Nevada Museum of Art; Reno, NV, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; the Philara Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; and the G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany.

Text courtesy MASSIMODECARLO.