Nairy Baghramian — Galerie Marian Goodman
The Marian Goodman Gallery presents Misfits, a solo exhibition by Iranian-German artist Nairy Baghramian, born in 1971, who articulates her sculptural work around the relationships of exchange and communication, projecting its visitor into constant doubt and confusion.
Exhibition : Nairy Baghramian — Misfits from June 10 to July 24, 2021. Learn more Anchored in their time and their place of exhibition, her proposals generally focus on adapting forms to the history and architecture of the places she invests, inserting into each of them a local dimension that participates in the narrative thread that she draws there. Behind these childish like forms the imagination, it is a whole reflection on the apprehension of the object which is outlined in its work.Continuing this questioning of the places she invests with dysfunctional forms and lines, close to the organic world and undoubtedly linked to the invention of human artefacts, Nairy Baghramian overlaps in this new exhibition paradoxes in an effective staging that thwarts the benchmarks of traditional aesthetics and moves away just as much from pure functionality.
A situation properly on the fringes which gives her full latitude to freely deploy her sculptures where doubt meets the joy of playfulness, where the history of art intrudes by breaking into the structural necessities of combinations of forms. If the playing field and its limits are fundamental in the artist’s reflection, the light arrangement of his pieces resonates in the open space with daylight of the Marian Goodman Gallery like a playful and premium stroll, radiant at first glance in the open square of a fertile imagination.
The walnut wood, no stranger to the environment of the exhibition, which constitutes the framework of the structures silently conveys an eventful history, passed into the hands of the American Secretary of Defense McNamara, clings to Carrara marble, relegating the nobility of the latter to the role of simple support holding one edge to the other. Having become, unlike the structure it inhabits, properly functional, marble acts as a fixation, fills and closes the holes.
The expected balance thus endangered, becomes the indication of a strange disagreement to come. On the wall, the image of a child among these structures frowns in a pouting pout, constantly turned towards an off-screen that separates us from all human life. Alone with these obviously unique objects, the viewer does not know whether to activate, contemplate or go beyond.
Because Nairy Baghramian creates, fundamentally, the hiatus between pleasant forms, apparently functional which nevertheless refuse, when observed closely, to agree with each other, to even represent the elements of a category. A bitter disappointment and a painful experience of the world’s frustrations for these objects directly inspired by children’s games, an original source of pleasure but also tools for learning manipulation in space. There is therefore something bitter about learning here, like the grimace of this child who accompanies us on this journey, immortalized on a deep blue background which is opposed to the pastels of the objects that inhabit the area. Formed of two parts, their assembly is more forced than truly “natural” and the meeting between two elements of the same world doesn’t happen without friction, even without damage when one considers the scattered elements which adjoin them, such as so many rejections calling for a new arrangement, a reinstatement in a later game.
Very current, yet genuinely playful and touching, these sculptures reveal a mischievously grumpy mood that turns to a form of humor that is not without depth. The playful regressive aesthetic is here perfectly assumed and, unlike certain trends in current sculpture, serves a perfectly articulated problematic between obscure forms and troubled feelings of childhood as such as the encounter with the unknown, the injunction to lightness and the ability to seize any object to integrate into an active fantasy. K, M and _Y, _ these titles sanction the familiarity of the geometric shapes with the learning of a language that Nairy Baghramian invites us to discover, reflecting the many detours sometimes necessary to allow the community exchange, the fruitful meeting with the Misfits who give their title to the exhibition. The majesty of the subject, the eminent history of sculpture, the venerable institution of language all glide over the irregular faces of these sculptures that a colossus seems to have modeled with his fingers.
Far from being sidelined from the world in a post-conceptual reverie, the tortuous lines of these dysfunctional architectures refer precisely to a feeling of reality, a reversal of proportions that send adults and children back to back. An analogous disturbance thought of as the malicious mirror of the feeling of “foreignness” of these children faccing the rational system of a world of their counterparts, the adults.
It’s finally our turn to struggle with these forms which, however playful and “human” they appear, embody a strange power of deviation from our expectations and plunge us into a stupor which finds an striking echo in the scowl of the little girl who gives us a stunning educational paradigm.
