Nairy Baghramian honoured with the 2022 Nasher Prize for sculpture

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA, has announced Nairy Baghramian as the recipient of the 2022 Nasher Prize. Baghramian is a German citizen born in 1971 in Iran and a visual artist living and working in Berlin since 1984.

Now in its sixth year, the Nasher Prize is an international award for sculpture, established to honour a living artist who elevates the understanding of sculpture and its possibilities. Baghramian will be presented with an award designed by Renzo Piano, architect of the Nasher Sculpture Center, at a ceremony in Dallas on April 2, 2022.

Baghramian takes the creation and presentation of sculpture as her de facto subject; yet makes works highlighting the poignant, contradictory and sometimes humorous, circumstances that can suffuse both the artistic process as well as everyday life.

Over the past three decades, she has explored elements of sculptural practice and installation, to create works that challenge their settings and upend expected modes of presentation as well as the architectural, sociological, political and historical contexts that inform them.  The Nasher Prize jury deliberated virtually in June 2021 to determine the 2022 laureate, under the grip of a global pandemic and after a year of social distancing.

Nasher Prize winner Nairy Baghramian.

“This year, after a prolonged time of separation from people and places during the pandemic, the work of Nairy Baghramian stood out to the jury as exemplary for its consideration of the body, human relationship, and the built environment through sculpture that champions the often-overlooked objects, people, and experiences at play in daily life,” says Nasher Director Jeremy Strick.

“Baghramian’s visual language is rooted in traditions of sculptural form and shape,” says Nasher Prize juror, artist Phyllida Barlow, “but she transforms those traditions into profoundly personal relationships with diverse references — from the architectural to the anthropomorphic — where  curvaceous, stretched, folded forms compete with linear structures, all delivered with Baghramian’s intensely researched and deft technical and material innovations.”

Baghramian has explored the relation of modelling, moulding and casting — interrelated elements of sculpture production involving positive and negative forms — throughout her career, and she consistently humanises this largely mechanical process through overt or oblique references to the body.

Using an abstract vocabulary that often combines geometric and organic forms, as well as industrial materials and processes with elements that appear soft and supple, she highlights the subtle ligatures uniting disparate human activities.

In the 2012 installation Retainer, she erected a semi-circular phalanx of barriers in the gallery, partially surrounding the viewer — impeding movement through the space even as it offered a kind of embrace.

Baghramian elaborates these motifs in the series Scruff of the Neck from 2016, with more overt evocations of dental forms. Likewise, her recent work, Knee and Elbow, commissioned for the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2020, suggests a monument to parts of the body that bend and often fail: arches formed of large sections of pink and white marble connected with polished stainless-steel fittings like enormous bones sutured back together with medical-grade steel pins.Baghramian’s sculptures often rely on external supports, architecture, or each other for their stability; in doing so, they frequently suggest parallels with the body’s own interior architecture, such as the mouth and the skull.

The Dwindlers comprise curved sections of cast glass held in place by rough, zincked-metal supports bolted to the gallery wall, encapsulating space in segmented runs through a room, even across doorways.

The works suggest not only deteriorating ducts or chutes, but also intestinal passages or prostheses, lending the industrial associations a vulnerability not normally ascribed to them.

While much of Baghramian’s work involves a critical engagement with architecture and obdurately obstructing passages, certain sculptures register more subtly, although they antagonise and complicate prescribed art spaces and viewers’ expectations in equal measure.

Peeper (2016), for example, comprises thick metal wire outfitted along its length with blue rubber washers and secured to an orange clamp anchored to the wall.

When installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2017, Baghramian left one end of the long metal cord on the ground, flaccid and untethered from a second anchor on the adjacent wall, on the other side of a doorway, to which it should presumably have been fastened. This gave the impression that a barricade had been breached and the gallery unlawfully entered, creating an unsettling ambiguity for the viewer about Peeper’s status as art and rendering the entrance into the gallery an experience of possible trespass, much as the sculpture’s title suggests.

Other works, most notably the series called Stay Downers, references a different realm of ineptitude, illicitness, or abjection. Individual works specify the exact nature of the problem, identifying with reductive labels those lowest on the adolescent social ladder: Nerd, Ugly Duckling, Malingerer, Babbler, Truant.

The clusters of sculptures — thick, interlocking blobs or narrow, irregular oblongs in pastels and fleshy tones — are often installed in hard-to-reach corners or shyly along the wall, a cohort of the rejected.

The somewhat organic forms of the Stay Downers further play with notions of social rejection by recalling cast-off or expelled products of the body, implicitly suggesting a connection to the efforts of artists.

Located in the heart of the Dallas Arts District and designed by architect Renzo Piano, the Nasher Sculpture Center is home to the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary sculpture in the world, featuring more than 300 masterpieces by Calder, de Kooning, di Suvero, Giacometti, Gormley, Hepworth, Kelly, Matisse, Miró, Moore, Picasso, Rodin, Serra and Shapiro, among others.