NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Modèle Vivant (Se ployant) by the artist Nairy Baghramian. Since the turn of the millennium, the Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian has developed a distinct syntax and distinguished body of sculpture.

June 7 - September 7, 2024

Employing a vast repertoire of procedures and techniques, such as carving, casting and modeling, as well as an expansive panoply of materials, including metal, wood, marble, wax, epoxy resin, glass and plaster, her works today are globally recognized for imbricating or juxtaposing amorphous or organic shapes with geometric support structures, display apparatuses or framing devices in highly original sculptures and incisive installations.

Baghramian’s decidedly abstract, yet eminently allusive (but never anthropomorphic) sculptures have frequently incorporated morphologies or prompted associations with items from other aesthetic spheres of making, using and staging objects—for instance theatre, dance, fashion, interior design, architecture and infrastructure.

The artist’s sculptures consistently establish an intricate, if not outright precarious rapport with the sites and spaces of their installation (often with recourse to margins, passages or minor details of the given architecture), poignantly confronting the beholding subject and its own habitus with the presence, obstinacy and mutability of all bodily existence and experience. Placed directly on the floor in two corners of the gallery space in Zurich, next to a column or dangling from the ceiling in the entrance area, the eight new sculptures appear to elicit bodies that withdraw and recline.

However, three of the works Baghramian conceived for her solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth enact and embody a counter-movement relative to this celebrated ‘model’, as beholders do not encounter a gendered formation claiming autonomy while being deliberately exposed to their gazes (in the venerable tradition of the Odalisque, Venus or Olympia).

The marginal placement and decompressed composition of these works throw the negative space both structuring and surrounding them into vibrant relief. Throughout her trajectory thus far, Baghramian has repeatedly emphasized the constitutive function of absence and emptiness in the production and perception of sculpture. 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.

‘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.