Nairy Baghramian’s abstract, process-driven sculptures can be interpreted as solutions to problems that we might have trouble identifying. In many ways, the flexibility of her work reflects the trajectory of her life and her unusual education in art. An Iranian-born, German artist of Armenian descent, she had to reinvent herself after arriving in Berlin as a youth in 1984. She soon excelled at figuring things out, parsing her surroundings and observations into a rigorous, open-minded approach to art-making and inquiry.
Created in an improvisational manner, without preparatory studies and subject to adjustment and evolution, her works involve intuition and respond to their intended setting. Baghramian shuns prescribed meanings, leaving her work open-ended and vulnerable. Equally wary of perfection, she rejects any form of idealization; instead, as she says, she “prioritiz(es) the perspectives of children.” A sense of play permeates her work, which also displays empathy and humor—additional survival skills. She draws sculptures, though never in preparation for sculpture, and likes handling the industrial materials that she prefers, which amounts to an ongoing learning process involving trial and error. In the words of one curator, Baghramian welcomes “doubt, indecision, and even failure.”
Sculpture was traditionally about the body and its emotional makeup. Baghramian’s abstracted forms, which do what our bodies do, take on our mortal shells indirectly. They convey attitudes. They can be erotic or abject. They perform, hang, lean, stretch, slouch, bend, sit, and lie down. They even acquire titles that reflect their actions as in the case of Se ployant (soufre) and S’accrochant (encre), two works from her 2024 exhibition “Modèle vivant (Se ployant),” coined in French (a language with which she is less familiar) to keep things off-kilter and mysterious.
Taking the position of an outsider in her chosen field, Baghramian also bypasses the traditional division between statuary and relief sculpture. Her mixed-media works rarely act as we assume sculpture should do, sometimes lacking decorum and always defying expectations. Like some of her artistic predecessors, she frequently does away with base, plinth, and pedestal. Color matters as well. It is often subdued, as if washed or sucked out. She cites the Surrealist sculptors Hans Arp and Isamu Noguchi as influences. Their impact percolates through the lens of post-Minimalism, mixed in with a dash of Franz West and DIY, at times grungy, aesthetic tendencies (as celebrated in “Unmonumental” at the New Museum in 2007–08).
The abstract, biomorphic forms that Baghramian produces often look eroded, fragile like our bodies, which age and change, thereby evoking the ravages of time. Erosion reduces everything to residue, and yet, Baghramian welcomes impermanence, accepting the eventual breakdown of her work.
Michaël Amy: The 1979 triumph of the mullahs in your native Iran brought about a repression of cultural expression. Did your espousal of culture, following your arrival in Berlin in 1984, amount to an act of political rebellion and healing?
Nairy Baghramian: It is interesting—and perhaps, given the zeitgeist, somewhat understandable—that I am usually approached first in terms of my origin and experience as a refugee. At the same time, it has become increasingly important for me to advocate for a more complex and consciously constructed understanding of identity. . .
. . . Subscribe to print and/or digital editions of Sculpture to read the full article.
