Hannah Levy adorns BAMPFA with signature corporal sculptures

Visual arts, like any other sphere of expression, have evolved, even mutated, immensely through the decades. With each era teeming with novelties concerning expression, ideas, technology, or media, arts and artists have perpetually adapted and persevered. From painting to digital art, photography to filmmaking, and sculpture to architecture, artistic languages have reflected societal changes. Sculptural art, with its magnificence operating in three dimensions, goes beyond being just a vision to being a tangible one. Contemporary sculpture artists give prominence to experimentation in terms of materials and silhouettes. Hannah Levy, an acclaimed American artist known for her steel-and-silicone creations, is one such sculptor.

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) brings Levy’s first solo museum exhibition to the West Coast. Hannah Levy / MATRIX 279, the latest instalment of the MATRIX Program at BAMPFA, is open to the public from August 10, 2022, through January 8, 2023. The art exhibition showcases six recent sculptures by Levy, including a new sculpture unveiled for the first time. “Hannah Levy’s work evades the functionality and ostensible neutrality of industrial design to evoke the fragility, strength, and uncanniness of inhabiting a body,” said BAMPFA Curatorial Assistant Claire Frost, who coordinated the MATRIX exhibition. “The dynamic tension that emerges from the interplay between her steel and silicone materials suggests a feminist critique that exposes the way rigid structures squeeze and stretch anything that doesn’t conform to its ideals,” she adds.

Her sculptural oeuvre is evocative of animalistic metal skeletons, with the stretched silicone replicating human and nonhuman flesh. Levy explores the visceral tension between flesh and metal through her body of work, positioned at the crossroads of industrial production, modernist design, and dystopian futures. The steel frames are hand-welded by the artist, who works intuitively without renderings directing her process. Thin silicone surfaces stretched across rigid metal structures, a coexistence of extremities on the spectrum of hardness, have become a signature of the sculptor’s work. One industrial and the other fleshy, the dialogue between the conflicting materials surprisingly spotlights similarities in how they blend with the environment.

These sculptural installations were created drawing influence from and in response to Mies van der Rohe’s architecture of the Arts Club of Chicago, where her work went on view in 2021. Along with the five previously showcased pieces, Levy has created a new sculpture specifically for this BAMPFA presentation. In stark contrast to the cliched image of clean white walls and straight lines associated with Modernism, Levy’s clawed figures stir thoughts while simultaneously evoking the repulsive vibrations of sharpened talons on polished stone, generating visceral responses in the viewers.

Levy uses metal claws of different heights to shape pointed stilts for human use. The vicious high heels, which are worn with PVC sandal straps and evoke trembling ankles tethered to pinching stilts, invite viewers to imagine embracing the unsubtle risk. The shine that covers the skeletal structures enhances the exhibition's aesthetic appeal. The tent-like formation, on the other hand, is the culmination of a composition that began with an image of a bat wing. A portrait of a giant creature with carved knuckles and translucent flesh, the silicone tent appears to be skinned, the transparent red tone enforcing this vision. The disturbing yet enticing assemblage is an apt rendition of its muse, a bat wing – thinly stretched flesh with fragile bones seen through.

The centrepiece of the display is a claw-armed chandelier clothed in elegant corsetry that resembles flesh. The chandelier is transformed into a human figure as one looks at its copper frame embellished with stretched silicone bustier membranes. The yellow silicone laced 'dress' features the texture of crocodile skin. This cinched garb is held in place by fierce claws at the top and bottom, planting a gruesome vision of hidden torment in the viewer’s mind,

MATRIX Program at BAMPFA is a leading exhibition series that brings unique and crucial voices in contemporary art to the forefront since its inception. Born and based in New York City, Hannah Levy has participated in group exhibitions across Europe, Asia, and the United States, her recent presentation at the Venice Biennale being one of her notable projects. As otherworldly as Levy’s creations may seem, the reactions and emotions they evoke are very earthly. The solo exhibition enunciates her developed language of desire that abstains from the usual gluttonous gaze without abandoning sensuality. The sculptural body of work expresses both dread and ecstasy through expertly sculpted eerie figures that portray pleasure through mundane objects and corporeal designs. Through her choice of unconventional materials and an even more bizarre pairing of the same, Levy realises ghastly creatures and stimulating silhouettes that highlight the feeling of finding beauty in destructive form.

Hannah Levy / MATRIX 279 will be on display from August 10, 2022, to January 8, 2023, at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), California.