…sculpture should have the chance to not fulfill expectations. — Nairy Baghramian
Baghramian’s work comprises sculpture and installation often in reference to architecture and the human body. Her work addresses temporal, spatial and social relationships to language, history, and the present, with forms which materialize in response to contextual conditions or the premises of a given medium. These structures offer the possibility of an open and discursive dialogue in response to a site, or a freeing of the assigned relationship between an object and its meaning.
In conjunction with her sculptures and installations, Baghramian has throughout her career produced significant sketches, drawings, and maquettes, known as Side Leaps. While conceptually underpinning her large-scale sculptural works, and compared by the artist to her studio tools, these sketches, drawings and maquettes are periphery studies for sculptures that will never exist. In Baghramian’s words, the Side Leaps “have not been allowed to become sculpture.” As such, they provide intimate and invaluable insight into the artist’s working practice, becoming as consequential as the realized sculpture.
Recent solo shows include her façade commission, Scratching the Back, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and those at Aspen Art Museum; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan; MUDAM Luxembourg; Palacio de Cristal, Madrid; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Serralves Museum, Porto; MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; and the Kunsthalle Mannheim. She has participated in the Yorkshire Sculpture International at The Hepworth Wakefield, Venice Biennale, Skulptur Projekt Munster, the 8th and 5th Berlin Biennale, and Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.
[excerpted from Marian Goodman Gallery website: www.mariangoodman.com]