Nairy Baghramian: Maintainers

For her first exhibition at kurimanzutto, Nairy Baghramian presents recent sculptures. They consist of raw aluminium casts, colored wax forms and lacquer painted braces. While presented in a disparate composition within the gallery space, all of the elements resonate with a visible correlation and an inherent potential for interdependence and connectivity. The shapes of the abstract cuboids made of polishing wax defy modernist vocabularies. Their material nature implies a submissive utilitarian purpose, as they exist to preserve their aluminium counterparts who could gradually consume them over time.

Nairy Baghramian’s practice is galvanized by a determination to bridge formal concerns with investigations of content. She is committed to an active questioning of traditional sculpture, layering her work with reflections on institutional realities, socio-political themes and historical antecedents from the worlds of art, architecture and design. Baghramian often challenges the limits of sculpture and moulds, object and signification, strength and fragility, organic and mechanical. Nairy Baghramian‘s two-part sculpture “Maintainers” consists of a cast of wax used for polishing aluminum and a seemingly identical aluminum cast. The two objects appear in close relationship and interact throughout the artist‘s serial casting process, as the wax cast is potentially consumed during the polishing act. The work playfully explores Nairy Baghramian‘s conceptual interests in “… thingly speculations, … the organic and the machinic, … and the corporeal and the mental”.