Hannah Levy: MATRIX 279
The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents the first West Coast museum exhibition of work by Hannah Levy, the acclaimed sculptor whose steel-and-silicone creations explore the visceral tension between flesh and metal.
The exhibition “MATRIX 279” showcases six recent sculptures by artist Hannah Levy, including a major new work that will be on view for the first time at BAMPFA. Complementing a concurrent presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale, Levy’s solo museum debut is the latest installment of the “MATRIX” Program at BAMPFA, a vanguard exhibition series that has highlighted distinctive and important voices in contemporary art for the past four decades.
Noted for her evocative integrations of gleaming metal with squishy facsimiles of human and non-human flesh, Levy has created a body of work that exists at the intersection of industrial production, Modernist design, and dystopian futurism. Levy’s work often features thin silicone surfaces tenuously stretched across rigid metal structures, such as a claw-armed chandelier adorned with ornate corsetry that resembles skin. Levy’s “MATRIX 279” presentation encompasses a series of sculptures made in response to the Mies van der Rohe architecture of the Arts Club of Chicago, where her work went on view in 2021. Accompanying these five works, Levy has created a new sculpture specifically for the BAMPFA presentation, which includes a glass component for the first time in the artist’s practice.
