Born and based in New York, Hannah Levy produces tactile, creaturelike sculptures that infuse the stripped-down lines of Modernist design with a visceral tension that is simultaneously sterile and erotic, amusing and disturbing. Her meticulously crafted welded forms are often paired with fleshy silicone. These incongruous textures are expertly manipulated to accentuate the sensuality hidden in modern design. Through the appropriation of commonplace forms and objects, Levy renders the familiar deeply strange. As function is lost, uncanny configurations evoke the ways in which we fetishize objects, spaces, and the bodies that utilize them.
For MATRIX 279 , Levy presents a series of sculptures made in response to the Mies van der Rohe–influenced architecture of the Arts Club of Chicago, where her work was on view in 2021. In these sculptures, stretched silicone creates fleshlike expanses that are held taught or perched precariously on rigid armatures. These zoomorphic forms invite comparison to insect legs, avian claws, stilettos, and corsetry. In addition, Levy debuts a new sculpture incorporating slumped glass into her practice for the first time. In this process, glass is heated to a flaccid state, allowing the force of gravity to transform the material. The glass solidifies into a bulbous slump that—unlike the elastic silicone—captures a moment in time that is deceptively fixed and fragile.