Hannah Levy

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 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.

Channels

Exhibitions

Biography

Solo exhibitions
Year
Country, Exhibition Name, Location
2023
USA, Crutch, Casey Kaplan, New York
2022
USA, Hannah Levy: MATRIX 279, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
2021
USA, Retainer, High Line Commission, New York
USA, Hannah Levy: Surplus Tension, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago
2020
USA, Hannah Levy: Pendulous Picnic, Casey Kaplan, New York
2019
USA, Bone-In, Jeffrey Stark, New York
2018
USA, Ireland Swamp Salad, C L E A R I N G, New York
IRL, Panic Hardware, Mother's Tankstation, Dublin
2017
USA, Gourmet Garden, Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland
2016
USA, Hannah Levy, White Flag Projects Library, St. Louis
USA, Shall we sit, stand or kneel?, Marlborough Chelsea, New York
2015
USA, Basic Essentials, Allen and Eldridge at James Fuentes Gallery, New York
D, Live in yours, play in ours, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt
2014
D, Vegetative State, Galerie Parisa Kind Deuxième Bureau, Frankfurt
Group exhibitions
Year
Country, Exhibition Name, Location
2024
USA, This Isn't Who It Would Be, If It Wasn't Who It Is, Casey Kaplan, New York
USA, Full Disclosure: Selections from the Thomas-Suwall Collection, Plains Art Museum, Fargo
2023
USA, Moveables, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
USA, Shapeshifting: Or, Synonyms for Skin Curated by MFA candidate Mary Kathryn Fellios, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson
2022
USA, Women of Now: Dialogues of Identity, Memory and Place, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas
I, The Milk of Dreams, 59. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte, Venezia
F, manifesto of fragility, 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon
USA, The Virtues of Rebellion: Modern and Contemporary Surrealisms, Phillips, New York
CDN, 51@51: Collected Works, Rennie Museum, Vancouver
USA, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield
2021
USA, Indoor Dining, Marinaro Gallery, New York
SRB, The Dreamers, 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennal, Beograd
USA, Where the threads are worn, Casey Kaplan, New York
2019
I, Campi Magnetici (Magnetic Fields) Curated by Cecilia Alemani, Gio Marconi, Milano
USA, Tissue, Company, New York
DK, Moving Images: Video works from the Louisiana Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
I, The new frontiers of the contemporary, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza
D, Wege zur Welt - Hildebrand Collection, G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig
2018
USA, This Is Not A Prop, David Zwirner, New York
PRC, The Artist is Present Curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Yuz Museum, Shanghai
DK, After the Finish Line Curated by Helga Christoffersen, Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Copenhagen
DK, Colour Form Texture: Selections from the Collection, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
USA, I See You, SCAD Museum, Savanna
USA, Keep Me Warm, C L E A R I N G, Brooklyn, NY
USA, Sit In, September, Hudson
USA, Without God or Governance, Marinaro, New York
D, Insane in the Membrane, Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf
USA, Summer of Love, Green Gallery, Milwaukee
2017
USA, Faire L’andouille, Bahamas Biennale, Detroit
USA, Past Skin, MoMA PS1, New York
D, Things I Think I Want. Six Positions of Contemporary Art, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt
F, L'Institut d'esthétique, Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Public collections

Country
Location
Australia
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Denmark
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
Germany
G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig
Philara Foundation, Dusseldorf
Sweden
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
United States of America
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada

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Hannah Levy