Hannah Levy
Hannah Levy’s sculptural work - that borders on the hallucinogenic - takes MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique.
Hannah Levy operates on ambiguity. At the intersection of prosthetics, furniture and the organic, her work is constructed with ambitious stainless-steel structures that she makes by hand, and combines with the contrasting malleability of silicone stretched, pinched, or hung onto her cold metallic forms.
At MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, hovering mid-air, held horizontally by a pair of ghastly, skeletal claws, an enormous asparagus is presented to onlookers, as if on offering for all to see. Its fleshy texture, larger-than-life scale and languid posture are eerily reminiscent of a human body in repose.
For Hannah Levy, the asparagus is a cherished, yet comical subject. An auspicious symbol of incoming spring days, not to mention a certain form of earthly delight. The asparagus also has the power to affect its consumers with the same, slightly uncomfortable yet unmistakable, lingering bodily odour.
Recurrent in her practice, play with scale has allowed Levy to delve into the uncanny, touching on themes of discomfort, impending danger and our coexistence with it all. From her three-quarter scale chair sculptures - too small for an adult but too large for a child, and certainly too fragile to uphold the weight of any human body - to shrunken bassinets too delicate and precarious to contain a newborn, Hannah Levy toys with our perception of these familiar, everyday items.
Operating within the same logic, she enlarges reality, choosing objects ranging from a gigantic metal bone - a comical memento mori – to a marble retainer synonymous with adolescent angst, or an ottoman sized peach pit potentially replete with deadly doses of cyanide poison. Her sculptures are as fascinating in their formal perfection as they are mutedly threatening.
sThrough Hannah Levy’s transformative work, we find ourselves, like Alice, inadvertently stepping through the looking glass, into another dimension where scale is altered, and we may just find a note saying “eat me” in a corner of the room. Who knows what might happen if we lean into the fantasy.
The Artist
Hannah Levy was born in New York City, USA in 1991. She currently works and lives in New York.
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 glass 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 twentieth-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, US (2013), and a Meisterschüler title from Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2015). With recent and upcoming institutional solo exhibitions at Museo Nivola, Sardinia, Italy (2026); The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), US (2022) and the Arts Club of Chicago, US (2021). The artist has been included in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, US; Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, Germany; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, US; the Rennie Museum, Vancouver, Canada; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield CT, US; MoMA PS1, New York, US; 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 Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Odunpazarı Modern Museum, Eskişehir, Turkey; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Ireland; the Philara Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; and the Nevada Museum of Art; Reno, US.