Hannah Perry: Film Stills

In her solo exhibition at Galerie Kandlhofer, Hannah Perry brings together wall-based sculptures and a series of screen prints that build on her recent exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle. Across these works,  Perry pushes at the material and conceptual edges of screen-printing, folding in painterly gestures, industrial references, and personal histories to create surfaces charged with friction.

Cars, both as object and symbol, run through Perry’s practice. Growing up around family members who worked with vehicles, she draws on this world not as nostalgia but as a visual language loaded with associations of class, labour, and spectacle. Here, Mustang car panels hang on the wall, their gleaming surfaces repurposed as sculptural reliefs. Detached from function, they shift between cinematic icon and industrial ruin. Elsewhere, images of crushed cars     stacked in scrapyards speak to cycles of desire, consumption, and destruction are motifs that recur across the exhibition.

Perry’s screenprints operate as restless image fields, where media fragments such as magazine clippings, film stills, and recurring figures collide and repeat. Glamorous models resembling Rihanna, wild dogs, and fragments of hyper-feminine poses emerge, only to be smeared, scraped back, or interrupted by flecks of colour and impasto. These interventions slice through the printed surface, creating painterly disruptions that resist the clean aesthetic often associated with screen-printing. What begins as recognisable imagery becomes unstable, caught between allure and abrasion.

Rather than avoid the technical flaws of the process, Perry leans into them - misregistration, bleed, ghosting, and double exposure are deliberate. In this, she joins a lineage of artists, from Andy Warhol to Kelley Walker and Wade Guyton, who use screen printing not for its precision but for its capacity to slip. Yet Perry pushes further, forcing the medium into uneasy proximity with painting. As the brush moves across the screen, the squeegee stutters, and the surface becomes a site of friction. Derived from the Latin word fricare meaning ‘to rub’ and generally stands for ‘a force that opposes relative motion between two entities’. In Perry’s activation, frictionbecomes the two forces working against one another, generating tension and the potential for something new.

This act of rubbing images against their own grain feels central to Perry’s interest in repetition and labour. Across the works, surfaces are worked and reworked as images stack up, break apart, and dissolve. What is glossy becomes aggressive; what feels familiar slips into something uncanny. Perry lingers in these unstable moments, opening up space for the viewer to consider how desire, identity, and violence are constructed, and undone, through visual culture.

Throughout the exhibition, Perry treats both image and material as sites of negotiation, pushing at surfaces until they give way, revealing the spaces in-between. In doing so, she stages a quiet confrontation with the seductive gloss of mass imagery, asking what happens when we refuse to look away from the rupture.

Text by Fatoş Üstek