Nivola Museum presents Blue Blooded – Sangue blu, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Hannah Levy, opening on Saturday, March 28. 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: a marine arthropod with an unsettling appearance 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 silicone and translucent glass, generating sinuous forms that—while recalling imagery rooted in Surrealism—evoke animals, insects, and organic morphologies, while discreetly alluding to the elegance of Art Nouveau and modernist design. Positioned within a genealogy that includes artists such as Meret Oppenheim, Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Gober, Levy merges industrial aesthetics with natural imagery to suggest presences that are at once seductive and unsettling.
The central work of the exhibition is a large tentacular structure made of stainless steel and silicone, reminiscent of a light canopy supported by long, slender legs. Its proportions echo those of the museum space, and its silhouette simultaneously suggests a seaside shelter and a fossilized skeleton displayed in a natural history museum. The stretched covering, resembling a spiny shell, together with legs inspired by the morphology of the horseshoe crab, gives rise to an architectural organism that inhabits the nave as a presence suspended between refuge and relic.
Alongside this installation, glass sculptures are supported by sharp metallic claws. These forms appear like bodies held in tension, poised midway between a fluid and a solid state. One glass form, shell-like in appearance, extends across delicate supports, like an animal acclimating itself as it finds refuge in a new habitat. In these works, the glass exists as the trace of a past action: the moment of its transformation in a molten state under the pressure of stainless steel, frozen in time.
Another work consists of a series of aluminum shells cast from the spiny exterior of the horseshoe crab, with elongated, exaggerated sculptural tails. The inverted shell of one of these alien creatures is filled with poured blue glass, revealing the anatomy of the crustacean’s underside. Produced through the traditional lost-wax casting process, these objects combine ancient craft practices with imagery that evokes a vaguely prehistoric world. On the walls, stainless steel elements resembling claws are installed like organic-shaped sconces: each pair of talons grips an irregular sphere of blown blue glass, lending the ensemble an ambiguous and slightly unsettling sensuality.
In the exhibition, the horseshoe crab functions as an ideal fulcrum: a presence that orients every work, even when it is not immediately recognizable.
At once archaic and strikingly contemporary, the horseshoe crab is fascinating both visually and symbolically. Often described as a “living fossil,” it has remained almost unchanged since the Triassic era and carries within its body the imprint of Prehistory. Its vivid 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 increasing ethical and environmental concerns. Although it remains crucial for medical testing in the United States (a synthetic substitute has been approved in the European Union since 2020), this practice raises urgent questions about the moral limits of exploiting natural resources and about human responsibility toward the species on which our survival depends.
The project was 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 strong architectural identity of the building became the starting point of the exhibition. During her research, Levy discovered a remarkable connection with Nivola: she learned that the sculptor first experimented with his renowned sandcasting technique while playing with his children on the beach in Springs, Long Island. Along that same coastline, Levy collected numerous horseshoe crab specimens that form the conceptual matrix of the exhibition.
Like Nivola, Hannah Levy explores the boundary between art and architecture, conceiving sculpture as a spatial and public experience. The rectangular volume and structural clarity of the space provide a counterpoint to the curved, pulsating lines of the sculptures. 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 resonating 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 offers a reflection on the fragility of the systems that sustain contemporary life and on the need to rethink our relationship with the living world.
