Born New York, 1991, lives and works in New York.
Hannah Levy’s surrealistic sculptures revisualise the formal language of classic, modernist design office and home furnishings into extraordinary and alluring anthropomorphic forms. Handrails, gym equipment, medical devices, and other mundane, mass-produced, functional items are mined for their forms and likenesses (commonalities), then mutated into unnameable singular things that embody human characteristics and emulate personality. Casts of natural produce and consumables are also subsumed into draped or stretched silicone skins that preserve an implied synthetic sustenance. The highly polished nickel-plated tubular frames of Levy’s sculptures are reminiscent of the flawless minimalism of Mies van der Rohe’s “skin and bone” architecture, while the flesh-like silicone and latex appendages of her sculptures are more analogous to fetishistic objects. It is through this striking discordance that Levy’s works emerge, equally super-normal and sensuously repulsive.
Hannah Levy held her first solo exhibition, Panic Hardware, with mother’s tankstation in May 2018 and her second solo exhibition with the gallery is forthcoming. Selected exhibitions and activities include: The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022), manifesto of fragility, 16th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath (2022), Retainer, High Line Commission, The High Line New York (2021), Pendulous Picnic, Casey Kaplan, New York (2020); Bone-in, Jeffrey Stark (2019); The Artist is Present, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018), The Artsy Vanguard, Bergdorf Goodman, New York (2018); Being There, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2017); Past Skin, MoMA PS1, New York (2017); Things I Think I Want, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2017); White Flag Projects Library, St. Louis (solo, 2016); Soft Costs_Money Over World, Kunstverein Wiesen, Wiesen (2016); Parked Like Serious Oysters, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2015) and Pretty Eyes, Electric Bills, Fordham University, New York (2015). Levy completed her MA at the Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2015.