Sayori Radda on Film Stills, Hannah Perry’s latest exhibition at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna.
Threading material and conceptual elements from her earlier Baltic show into new terrain, Film Stills at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, marks a continuation of Hannah Perry’s multidisciplinary exploration of gender, class, and cultural symbolism. The exhibition brings together screenprints and wall-based sculptural works that interrogate and subvert tropes loaded with socially coded meaning.
Using alternate modes of production — screen-printing on metal and for the first time on canvas, imprinting with a ten-ton hydraulic press, integrating ready-mades, painting, and film stills — the British artist deconstructs clichéd signifiers through disruption, layering, and material collision. Recurring motifs include fetishised cars, veneered, commodified images of women, and hyper-stylised nods to gendered and class-coded performances of power.
Reverberating through the first room, sculpture is stretched to its conceptual and material limits. A series of stark, rectangular aluminium works hang like paintings — brutally industrial, cold, and aggressively minimal. “I press steel shapes that resemble high heel marks onto aluminium using a ten-ton hydraulic press,” Perry explains, foregrounding the tension between surface and force, visibility and impression.
The gesture is conceptually loaded: as Perry notes, high heels — like aluminium, which is so often found in male-coded industrial environments (factories, automotive design, aerospace, construction, tech) — are charged with cultural symbolism. Emphasising the physical impossibility of a stiletto piercing such a material, she frames the imprint as an ironic contradiction in relation to stereotypes: “a tension between the masculine and the feminine.”
“I like the concept of dissecting something,” Perry explains in relation to The Protagonist (2024). In this work, she borrows the visual language of an entomological display, showcasing a wall-mounted sculpture from modified, machismo-laden Mustang car doors. A symbol of hyper-masculine power is reimagined through a feminist lens, its curves evoking a woman’s pelvis and subverting the car’s cultural connotations through bodily, gendered form.
“I wanted to arch back into the themes of that work — labour and the body — and ask how I reclaim independence from it, whether conceptually or sexually,” she reflects. “What would a feminine or feminist icon of sexual power look like, while still navigating this patriarchal idea?” Subverting toxic masculinity, Perry notes she “wanted to work with the ultimate muscle car — it’s this cliché, masculine fetish object. Slick, sexy surfaces become totems, in contrast with the form itself, which is so connected to ideas of childbirth or the female interior.”
For the first time, Perry forays into screen-printing on canvas rather than industrial metal, blurring the lines between print and painting while challenging the medium’s disciplinary constraints. She assembles a fractured visual lexicon, splicing together film stills, tabloid imagery, and hyper-stylised female icons to interrogate the construction of femininity as a mediated and performative ideal. Juxtaposed with personal and culturally saturated symbols like the Staffordshire bull terrier, which represents working-class resilience, aggression, and coded social threat, her compositions critique how class and gender are aestheticised, fetishised, and endlessly reproduced within visual culture.
In relation to the process behind her latest screenprints, Perry explains: “It is engineered layering — an engineered thought or idea — and it’s using the process to work against itself, in the same way that Warhol purposely reprinted them, occasionally leaving the ghost behind.” She adds, “I’ve always found that most interesting about his work. I’m not really into screenprint as a theme, idea, or aesthetic — it’s about perfection, precision. It’s vital that they’re on the threshold, off-centred, purposely off-shifted.”
Perry embraces what she calls “engineered failures” — moments where the process misaligns: the screen slips, the ink stutters, the registration skews. These glitches, or “ghosts,” become compositional tools. Starting with raw canvas layered in gesso, she washes the surface with watery pink tones that drip and bleed in ways she describes as “emotional, bodily, erotic, and fluid-like.”
From there, she repeatedly screenprints a scanned image, leaving behind what she calls the “ghost” — flickering traces where the screen misaligns — an intentional slip that undermines precision. With a squeegee or knife, she interrupts the surface again, dragging thick, abstract gestures across the image, recalling the disruptive mark-making of Rauschenberg or Richter. “The palette has this rich, lipstick-like feel,” the artist notes, pointing to the gendered and emotional codes her work consistently pulls apart.
Perry finds meaning not in polished outcomes, but in the fractures where process falters, revealing the unexpected. In Film Stills, the works unfold like a disjointed film, each piece a fragment, each title a clue guiding towards a complex narrative. What starts with the gloss and fetishism of commodified images and symbols evolves into a profound meditation on representation, control, and disruption. Through her practice, Perry dismantles conventional narratives, where imperfection equates power and the unresolved demands attention.
Written by Sayori Radda
Hannah Perry: Film Stills continues at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, until 16 May, 2025.
