NYAB Event - Nairy Baghramian "Retainer"

Nairy Baghramian "Retainer"

SculptureCenter

This event has ended.

SculptureCenter presents RETAINER by Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian. This will be her first exhibition in the United States. Baghramian’s work examines political and social systems of power and encompasses questions of context, production, and reception within contemporary art.

With the support of our Artist-in-Residence commissioning program, Baghramian has produced a new work for SculptureCenter’s main exhibition space that is suggestive of a corrective prosthesis for the building. For Baghramian, exhibition spaces are conceptual structures as much as they are habitable buildings. Their historically determined design and layout become both reference and structure of the work. This new sculpture, constructed from chromed struts draped with “sheets” of cast silicon, will occupy the entire main exhibition space. Partially industrially fabricated and partially handmade, the work provokes questions about the potential for sculpture and art as an aesthetic tool, but also highlights art’s dependency on its own context.

Nairy Baghramian was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1971, and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1985. Baghramian's recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a two-person show with Phyllida Barlow at Serpentine Gallery in London, and solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Kunstverein Aachen, and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Her work has been featured in several major international exhibitions including Sculpture Project Münster (2007), the Berlin Biennial (2008), Illuminations at the 54th Venice Biennial (2011), the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (2011) and Temporary Stedelijk 2, Stedelijk Museum(2011). Her work is currently on view in Olinka, o donde se crea el movimiento at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. She has upcoming projects at Muzeum Sztuki W Lodzi, Poland and MIT List Visual Arts Center. Baghramian was awarded the 2012 Hector Kunstpreis, which included an artist publication and an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim.

[Image: Nairy Baghramian "The Snag" Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz Cologne / Berlin]