NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN

For her inaugural solo exhibition at our gallery in Zurich, Baghramian will present eight abstract sculptures from 2024, five of which carry photographs, under the title ‘Modèle vivant (Se ployant).’ Concluding her series ‘Modèle vivant,’ initially begun on the occasion of her exhibition (mounted to mark her being awarded the prestigious Nasher Prize for excellence in contemporary sculpture) at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas in 2022, the artist’s new works intensify her probing, as indicated by the French term in the series’ title, of the tradition of drawing, painting or sculpting from a live model. Once more, Baghramian’s non-figurative sculptures on view in Zurich achieve to stage evocations of poses and postures, demeanors and dispositions while avoiding both gesturality and figuration.

Although the artist’s practice (that also includes photography, drawing, critical writings and curatorial collaborations) is widely noted for eschewing repetition, all of these multi-faceted creations could most adequately be defined as contemporary allegories of sculpture insofar as they truly render the circumstances of their own making tangible in their own appearance. For instance, in her critically acclaimed project ‘Scratching the Back’ (2023) Baghramian has adorned four niches of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade on Fifth Avenue in New York with monumental abstract sculptures. Combining grid formations with brightly colored slabs and swirls, these public works deliberately revisit idioms and principles of the artist’s own practice – only to attune them to the logic of shop window design.

As suggested by the title addition ‘Se ployant,’ Baghramian’s constructions of remotely biomorphic aluminum casts, painted with a light rosy hue, are upheld or undergirded by geometric armatures, hooks and rods, conjuring bent or bowed isolated bodies. Subtle patches of color (‘gris de lin’, ‘givre’ and ‘soufre’) distinguish each sculptural arrangement. As in her 2023 outdoor sculpture ‘S’adossante (Pauline),’ that engages with similar concerns as the ‘Modèle vivant’ series, the assembly of recumbent, leaning and hanging forms grants only approximations and allusions of a (human or other) gestalt.

Negating volume in turn invariably renders the pressures (figuratively or literally) exerted on the individual elements of any given group arrangement all the more palpable. In ‘Modèle vivant (Se ployant)’ the unmistakable interstices and gaps carry the same weight as the positive forms of bodies elicited at the hands of the artist. The quintessential sculptural facet of mass (which remains perceivable in its cancellation) consequently takes on a social resonance as well, as its very absence prompts the singular and disrupted bodily formations to retreat, but also gives leeway for perception, critique and reflection. The puzzling photographic detail of a mass of flies besetting the body of a horse (with which Baghramian supplements the front and back sides of her new suspended sculptures) in this light becomes intelligible as a striking image for the irresolvable tension between conforming with and holding against all imposed forces of a present situation.

_{Text by André Rottmann}