THE BODY ABSTRACTED

Our many ways of looking at Nairy Baghramian’s sculpture, which looks back at us.

BY EVE HILL-AGNUS

Left: Nairy Baghramian, Sitzengebliebene / Stay Downers, 2017, polyurethane, lacquered aluminum, silicone. Installation view Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2017. Photograph by Timo Ohler. Opposite: 2022 Nasher Prize Laureate Nairy Baghramian. Still courtesy of Quin Mathews Films.

To see the work of 2022 Nasher Prize Laureate Nairy Baghramian is to confront the physical body aslant—its weight, magnitude, absurdity, vulnerability. The Iranian-born artist, who is the sixth recipient to be awarded the title, which was announced last September, has spoken in interviews about the fact that her questioning of sculptural form after an involvement with dance and theater emerged at least in part from the crucible and devastation of an Iran which her family fled in the 1970s, at a time when its leaders had rejected representational art. It is as though the artist deliberately took up sculpture to fill the void, choosing the most tangible, voluminous of practices. Thus, her solidity could be seen as arising from a place of non-culture, of absent or disallowed art forms.

Her work over more than two decades has consistently interrogated bodies, shape, and intentional play. Large-scale or human-scale forms, made primarily in her studio and foundry in Berlin, the city where she has lived and worked since 1984, lead one through a primer, a course in questioning the relationship between things that possess volume, mass, weight, texture.

A polyglot, she has said of sculpture-making, “I chose that language because I could transform my ideas, my desires, my wishes … I could formulate them with sculpture, and I think it’s a language I speak the best compared to all of them.” To fulfill that desire, she uses a syntax wholly her own, rife with contradictions and yet simple. “It challenges you on an eye level,” she says.

Propped, draped, and strewn in spaces, her works are cut, stitched, cast, and molded into a non-hierarchical plasticity using diverse materials: silicon, resins, polyurethane, aluminum, rubber, blown glass, wire. In her work Maintainers (H), created in 2019, a gathering of rectangular panels in cast aluminum, cork, Styrofoam, and wax appears like tombstones or cushions, pneumatic and almost fleshy. Meanwhile,

Nairy Baghramian, Maintainers (H), 2019, cast aluminum, painted aluminum, cork, Styrofoam, pigmented paraffin wax, 92.53 x 161.4 x 110.35 in. Photograph by Cathy Carver.

titles themselves lean anthropomorphic, or anatomical, or suggestive of human action: Coude à Coude/Elbow to Elbow (2019); Misfits (2021); and Fluffing the Pillows (2013).

We’re faced with prosthetics and quasi-surrogates that hold bodily presence. In a deft sleight-of-hand, shapes seem organic though made of hard, inflexible, inorganic substances. They loll and lie and teeter and bulge and seem almost to breathe. They fill spaces by slouching. They slither around corners with amorphous corporeality. They bracket and skulk and hunker and dangle—in ways humorous and at times unnerving, close as they are to the uncanny. It’s a minimalist anthropomorphism that makes you question. You find bodily conjuring if not mimicking.

As part of a solo exhibit under the skylights of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 2008, a cadre of angular forms in epoxy resin, metal, and rubber stood like Brancusi-esque pieces or tethered Calder mobiles, like lights or lampposts. The installation is cleverly titled Class Reunion. The vaguely corporified forms push the edges of abstraction and verisimilitude, the body (absent) at the center of it all. In this, and in other works, Baghramian betrays her interest in design, inhabiting the borderlands of architecture, sculptural form, and objectmaking.

In Formage de tête exhibited in 2011 at the 54th Venice Biennale, neutral off-white, brown, and black silicon flaps flop on trestles. The mass looks like skins or pelts. It drips… No, it’s solid. Meanwhile, the mute cloth, pleather, rope, and rubber bolsters slung on the floor (Fluffing the Pillows) remind me of moles without eyes.

“Sculpture has so many layers and components. It’s a very complex medium,” Baghramian has said. “It looks static—it seems to be quiet and static—but it’s always moving.” Seen as a whole, singly or as a collection, the work tugs at you. What are you looking at? And why does it nudge the softest parts of you? Why, as a viewer, do you feel turned inside out? This is its power. The oeuvre creates an impression

Nairy Baghramian, Coude à Coude/Elbow to Elbow, 2019, cast aluminum, wax 84.69 x 57.5 x 3.125 in. Photograph by shift studio Berlin.

Nairy Baghramian, Fluffing the Pillows D (Silos, Gurney), 2013, fabric, rubber, pleather, hemp rope, chromed pole, Silo 1/2: 15.75 x 32.69 x 120.125 in.; Silo 2/2: 15 x 106.31 x 13.75 in.; Gurney: 3.125 x 92.5 x 23.62 in. Photograph by Timo Ohler; Nairy Baghramian, Klassentreffen/Class Reunion, 2008, colored cast rubber, painted metal, colored epoxy resin. Installation view Staatliche Kunsthalle BadenBaden, 2008. Photograph by Wolfgang Günzel.; Nairy Baghramian, Formage de tête, silicon, steel, lacquer, aluminum, silicone, stainless steel, lacquer, cast iron. Installation view, Venice Biennale, 2011, Italy.

of what one critic and writer has called “corporeal bewilderment.”

Sometimes quite literally. On a hill above the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the site-specific Knee and Elbow (2020), one of Baghramian’s most recent works, resembles quotation marks— large, pockmarked marble squiggles set in a field like a Stonehenge of massive joints, looming and yet whimsical. They should move us to consider, evince, and empathize with phantom pain, Baghramian has said about the piece. Always, the interactions ask us to humanize.

How the laureate’s work strikes in this age, in this particular moment in time, when the disconnect between the physical/corporeal and the digital/virtual has particular resonance, cannot be denied. Baghramian asks us to shift our stance, adjust our pose. To engage on the most visceral, corporeal level. Her pieces themselves take on different stances and positions, their materiality balanced but never fully resolved. In this, we are drawn into different levels of looking. In more ways than one, then, Baghramian’s work gives new meaning and gravity to the terms “body of work” and “site” and asks us to interrogate the somatic.

“It needs to be seen from different perspectives,” Baghramian says of sculpture. “And it even looks back at you from different corners” of a space or a room. The viewer encounters sculpture with a gaze that seeks to plumb and yet is always resisted, drawn, and deflected. Deeply intuitive but defying our grasping, the shapes themselves open up new possibilities of meaning.

The oeuvre creates gaps and parentheses of rich and subtle slippage. In the context of interior and exterior spaces, it opens up. In that gap we slide ourselves and our questioning. P

Nairy Baghramian, Knee and Elbow, 2020, marble, cast stainless steel, Elbow: 61.4 x 75.59 x 27.56 in.; Knee: 61.4 x 107.47 x 27.94 in. Photograph by Thomas Clark.