About the work

Hannah Levy creates sculptures that are at once elegant, seductive and subtly menacing.

In her work, she explores the history of design. She combines Modernism’s fascination with sleek, perfectly finished surfaces with the traditional Victorian form of claw-foot furniture. These claws evoke both stylised Art Nouveau forms and the paws of predatory animals. By combining organic, bodily materials with industrial ones, her work elicits both attraction and repulsion.

 Levy removes everyday objects from their familiar context and strips them of their original function. In doing so, she transforms the ordinary—things we normally barely notice—into something strange, alienating and, at the same time, irresistible.

 The *Untitled Asparagus* series was originally commissioned for the window displays of the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman. The sculptures were cast and coloured to achieve the highly specific drooping form and subtle colour gradations of asparagus.

 The claw-shaped feet are individually sculpted by hand by the artist. Through them, Levy further develops her playful exploration of the relationship between Modernist design, consumer culture and the human body.

 She combines the skin-like, almost fleshy quality of silicone and the yielding softness of flexible materials with meticulously crafted metal. Nickel-plated steel claws and legs recur as a motif throughout her oeuvre.

 Her sculptures evoke chairs, sofas and other design objects that appear to have mysteriously come to life or to harbour a hidden corporeality. The human body is always implicitly present, yet rarely fully visible. Often, only fragments of skin, soft forms or subtle references to the body remain, allowing her works to hover between object and organism, between design and living being.

Hannah Levy

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