ORANI.- Museo Nivola presents Blue Blooded – Sangue blu, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Hannah Levy. Curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, and Luca Cheri, the exhibition brings together a group of new sculptures inspired by the horseshoe crab, or limulus: an uncanny-looking marine arthropod that has survived for hundreds of millions of years and whose blue blood is now widely used to ensure the safety of vaccines and medical devices.

Levy’s sculptures combine polished metal with translucent silicone and glass, generating sinuous forms that - echoing a Surrealist-inflected imagery - recall animals, insects, and organic morphologies while subtly alluding to the elegance of Art Nouveau and Modernist design. Positioning herself within a lineage that includes artists such as Meret Oppenheim, Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Gober, Levy merges industrial aesthetics and natural imagery to evoke presences that are both seductive and unsettling.

The central work of the exhibition is a large tentacular structure in stainless steel and silicone. It resembles a light canopy supported by long, slender legs. Its proportions echo those of the museum space and its silhouette suggests at once a beach shelter and a fossilized skeleton on display in a natural history museum. The stretched spiny shell-like covering and legs inspired by the morphology of the horseshoe crab create an architectural organism that inhabits the nave like a presence suspended between refuge and relic.

Alongside this installation, are a series of glass sculptures supported by sharp metallic claws. These creature-like forms appear as bodies in tension, caught midway between fluid and solid states. A glass shell-like form stretches across delicate supports, like an animal acclimatising while finding refuge in a new dwelling. The glass in these works exists as a record of past action, the moment of its molten transformation under the pressure of stainless steel, frozen in time.

Another work consists of aluminium shells cast from the spiny exterior of the horseshoe crab, with long exaggerated and imposing sculptural tails. Atop these alien creatures, one shell sits overturned and filled with cast blue glass revealing the anatomy of the crab’s underbelly. Crafted through a traditional lost wax process, these objects combine various ancient artisanal practices with a vaguely prehistoric imagination. On the walls, stainless steel elements resembling pincers are installed like organically shaped sconces: each set of claws grips a misshapen orb of blown blue glass, imbuing the ensemble with an ambiguous, faintly disquieting sensuality.

In the exhibition, the horseshoe crab functions as an ideal fulcrum: a presence that orients every work, even when not immediately recognizable.

At once archaic and strikingly contemporary, the horseshoe crab is as compelling visually as it is symbolically. Often described as a “living fossil,” it has remained almost unchanged since the Triassic era and bears within its body an imprint of Prehistory. Its vividly blue blood contains Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL), a substance essential for detecting bacterial contamination in pharmaceutical products. Each year thousands of specimens are captured, bled, and returned to the sea in a process that has raised growing ethical and environmental concerns. While still vital to medicine in the US (in the European Union a synthetic substitute was approved in 2020), this practice prompts urgent questions about the moral limits of exploiting natural resources and about human responsibility toward species on which our own survival depends.

The project developed in direct dialogue with the museum’s exhibition space - the former washhouse of Orani - and with the figure of Costantino Nivola. The long, narrow nave, the gabled roof with exposed beams resembling ribs, and the building’s strong architectural identity became the exhibition’s point of departure. While researching for the exhibition, Levy unearthed an extraordinary connection with Nivola: she became aware that it was while playing with his children on the beach at Springs, Long Island, that the sculptor first experimented with his signature sandcasting technique. It was along that very same coastline that Levy collected the many horseshoe crab specimens that form the conceptual matrix of the show.

Like Nivola, Levy explores the boundary between art and architecture and conceives sculpture as a spatial and public experience. The rectangular volume and structural clarity of the space offer a counterpoint to the sculptures’ curved, pulsating lines. Within this essential environment, the works are arranged like living presences that place rigidity and softness, the natural and the artificial, into tension, transforming the architecture into a resonant chamber for the ethical questions and sensory impressions generated by the exhibition.

Blue Blooded - Sangue blu reveals Hannah Levy’s ability to construct sculptural universes in which technology and nature intertwine. The exhibition proposes a reflection on the fragility of the systems that sustain contemporary life, and on the need to rethink our relationship with the living world.

Hannah Levy (born 1991 in New York, where she lives and works) creates sculptures and installations that investigate relationships between the body, desire, and materiality. Her work combines industrial materials - particularly polished metal - with elements such as silicone and glass to create forms that evoke animal and vegetal anatomies as well as design objects. She participated in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams (2022), and has exhibited at major international institutions and galleries. Her works are held in public and private collections and have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions.

Blue Blooded – Sangue blu is her first solo institutional exhibition in Italy.