Zurich
“Modèle Vivant (Se ployant),” Nairy Baghramian’s current exhibition (on view through September 7, 2024), features two groups of sculptures distinguished by their physical properties. Gravity plays a part in both, but whereas the works collectively titled S’accrochant (Clinging or Hanging, 2022–24) are suspended by long metal rods from hooks in the ceiling and have the potential to move, those titled Se ployant (Bending, 2024) are fixed and extend laterally along the floor. Neither title is random, and their semantic interpretation explains as much about how the works function as their literal meaning.
The composition of Se ployant (givre) (Bending [frosted], 2024) accords closely with its name. Three pink slabs incline into each other and touch at a raised point to form a shallow arch. The mechanics of this precarious, unfolding posture are not hidden from view—a rod beneath the point of overlap fixes into a curved bar to buttress the shape and stave off collapse. This curved steel shaft then descends like an anchor to the base, where it is fastened to a cross-piece spanning two sections of an open metal structure resembling rectilinear joists.
Baghramian works in series to explore permutations that gather cumulatively within the group. So, the four pink slabs in Se ployant (gris de lin) (Bending [flax gray], 2024) stand upright, and the arrangement is less elegant in profile than in the previous ensemble. The irregular shapes are similar to those of Se ployant (givre) only bulkier, the surfaces craggier and more uneven, but they are still held in risky balance. One slab has split away to occupy its own hard and unyielding steel base, and it, too, requires a hook and bar to maintain its position. Both the single slab and the three-part ensemble overrun their bases to touch the floor, as if they had slipped from their intended placement. One such point is underpinned by small, pink supports that appear improvised to prevent repeated mishaps. The effect is almost dainty, as touching as it is unexpected.
Vulnerability defines these sculptures, and Baghramian forces the viewer to look into details and juggle anomalies of shape and composition for their significance. Discoveries inevitably follow, as if that is her point. The make-up of the slabs, for instance, is hidden beneath a colored coating so that their weight and heft, and the consequences of their collapse, are hard to assess. (Gallery literature alone identifies the material as cast aluminum.) Similarly, structural elements conventionally left hidden are visible as supports, armatures, and plinths. The parts do not seem to fit together comfortably, and the stresses and strains of their micro-architecture are apparent, culminating in an appreciation of the compositional frailty and the sensation that arrangements might shift.
While the steel props have the appearance of industrial design, the irregular elements placed on them suggest a different aesthetic. A frisson follows the recognition that these forms relate to the organic world, a resemblance reinforced by their flesh-like colors. So when the vicious, bulky bronze hook in Se ployant (soufre) (Bending [sulfur]), greasily patinated with pigment, grapples with the rear flank of one slab to latch onto a polished curved bar connected to the base, viewers might emit an audible “ouch” as the bar pinches a fold of putative skin. The aluminum is sand-cast, a process of making with its own expressive value that contributes to irregular and unpredictable outcomes and, as with shaping the “body,” allows failure.
The abstract character of these elements is not in doubt. Yet the actions with which slabs, hooks, and bars are endowed have an oblique likeness with an arm or leg propping the human body into extreme positions. While the body conceived as machine or architecture is not new, Baghramian’s transposition, which tinkers with the history of modern sculpture, is more nuanced. As resonances sway back and forth between objectivity and analogies to the figure, the advice that Henri Matisse gave students with regard to studying the model (in Sarah Stein’s record of his words in 1908) comes to mind: “Fit your parts into one another and build up your figure as a carpenter does a house. Everything must be constructed—built up of parts that make a unit: a tree like a human body, a human body like a cathedral.”
A Matisse sculpture featured among the works that the Iranian-born Baghramian (now resident in Berlin) selected from the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, on the occasion of her Nasher Prize show in 2022. That project, titled “Modèle Vivant” (“Life Model”), shares the theme of her current exhibition—namely the unseen labor of women and models in life drawing or sculpture classes. Baghramian’s choices in the Nasher show concentrated on sculpture as study and included figurative examples extolling agency for the object to be bold, playful, or in a way autonomous. Her inclusion of Matisse’s Large Seated Nude (1929) was revelatory. The figure’s audacious, cantilevered pose hovers between the classic positions of sitting and reclining, twisted into space without a central axis. As with Baghramian’s work, Matisse’s bronze mixes dynamism with tension, especially as the limbs step in to provide balance and stop the body from toppling. Again, details are telling, such as the left foot hooked behind the knee of the right leg.
Baghramian’s S’accrochant works, which she began in 2022, feel like a forceful response, a tangible link that connects the Nasher research to her own rigorously intellectual practice. They are not lovely objects, yet they feel necessary, loaded with urgency. The viewer confronts the angular body of S’accrochant (taupe) (Hanging [brownish-gray], 2022), for example, at around torso height. The asymmetrical aluminum panel is surrounded by a collar attached by joints and flanges on the perimeter. The eye follows these features to the steel rod that ascends to the hook high above, as another projects outward, and a third connects with a volumetric shape on the floor.
Two details heighten this already potent visual impact—the brutal, paint-smeared hook from which the panel hangs and the addition (on each side of the panel) of a c-print photograph of flies settled on horse skin. Perhaps the hardest detail to make sense of, the image underscores the abiding vulnerability of these tokens of corporeal entity. They elicit an emotional reaction that momentarily converts inert steel into sensitive flesh in the onlooker’s perception.
Baghramian frequently recruits the site of her exhibitions into a larger context for the work itself, with a particular sensitivity to the architecture of the spaces containing her projects. Though this exhibition is not site-specific, the setting is fortuitously complementary—the tall open spaces feature columns that serve as supports, just like the assumed gestures in the sculptures, while the building’s industrial past (it was a brewery) supplied Baghramian with hooks in the overhead beams from which to suspend the S’accrochant pieces.
Such responsiveness amplifies the ramifications of the show, which extend from artistic to social practices and behaviors, the experience entailing a confrontation with conventions and uncomfortable thoughts of coercion. Whether these awkward, intense, and absorbing objects are thought of as indicative of feats of gymnastic strength and agility or as carcasses of meat in a butcher’s shop, the undertow touches on impressions of patience, endurance, and forbearance in the face of eternal duress. The artist’s model is shaped like matter, modeled through the instruction of the life-class tutor; the laborer accepts the demands of factory work.
