Hannah Levy: Bulge

23 May-22 Jun 2024

Overview

MASSIMODECARLO is delighted to announce Bulge, American artist Hannah Levy’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and in London. Levy’s metal, glass, and silicone sculptures are like forbidden fruits, tempting the viewer as danger looms. Reminiscent of home or office furniture, hardware, prosthetics, as well as human flesh and food, the works expose a latent anxiety as function is removed from form, revealing themselves to be uncanny and otherworldly.

Drawing from the gallery’s architecture, dating back to 1723, Levy leans into and pushes against the space’s decorative accents and historically preserved green-painted walls. Tripod-legged, bulbous humanoids, glass wall sconces punctured by steel claws, and anthropomorphic furniture-like forms are both unearthly and naturally in situ within a surreal site of domesticity (further realized by Levy’s inclusion of a matching green carpet).

Since 2022, Levy's sculptures have taken on a new dimension with the integration of glass. The artist twists and molds the material into lumpy or scrunched shapes that droop over and burst from their polished metal confines. Standing erect in the center of the gallery, a mutant insect or perhaps alien visitor emerges from glass and steel. The lurching, larvae-like structure engages a technique drawn from late 18th century Venetian lighting fixtures. Glass is cautiously blown through a stainless-steel cage, its hot surface pressed through the gaps in the metal to achieve a distended appearance. On the walls, a series of stainless-steel claws are installed like Art Nouveau sconces. Each talon appears to squeeze a swollen orb of blown glass, imbuing the fixtures with eerie sensuality.

Grinding and welding metal by hand until the structures assume their corporeal forms, Levy humorously adapts traditional processes to her needs, creating new methods that capture her unique blend of the familiar and the menacing. A sculpture resembling a distorted Modernist chair perches on extended spiky legs. Silicone is stretched over the steel structure like taut flesh, blurring the lines between human and object. In another silicone and stainless-steel work, a spider-like structure takes on the formal qualities of a midcentury ottoman. A stretched silicone sheath centers the arachnid work in a reoccurring sentiment of fear and arousal inviting comparison to Louise Bourgeois’ iconic Maman, similarly delving into the realm of zoomorphic forms with playful intentions.

As the gallery pulses with a residential ambience that belies its poisonous inhabitants, a droopy silicone asparagus enlarged many times over is perched in the window of 55 South Audley Street. Two hand-carved stainless-steel claws fixed to the wall grasp the rubbery vegetable as it lays flaccid. Function becomes an illusion, leaving each form suspended in what the artist often refers to as a “design purgatory” - a limbo state of in-between, bulging with potential.

Artists