The abstracted sculptures of Misfits seem at home in the Nasher Sculpture Center’s front gallery. The interplay of objects formed from cast aluminum, colored marble and unoiled walnut evoke a humorous scene that stay-at-home parents might recognize from the last 740 days of pandemic homeschooling: crayons strewn about, ill-fitting puzzle pieces jammed together impatiently, an assortment of LEGOs and a wooden rocking horse in the middle of the floor. All that family-room debris morphs the gallery into a provisional space of thwarted play and moderated chaos.
The installation at the Nasher is the latest in the Misfits series from 2022 Nasher Prize laureate Nairy Baghramian. On April 2, the Iranian-born German artist will receive the award and the $100,000 prize at the Nasher Prize gala after two days of lectures and events. The prestigious award recognizes artists with developed bodies of work that have made an impact on the discipline of sculpture and that can speak to the concerns of the present moment. Baghramian is the sixth artist to win the prize, following Doris Salcedo (2016), Pierre Huyghe (2017), Theaster Gates (2018), Isa Genzken (2019) and Michael Rakowitz (2020).
![Nairy Baghramian's 2021 marble-and-wood sculpture "Misfits P" is among the works from her...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/2URD7PRB7FFAJH7EGPLJ7LAX2M.jpg?auth=c3ca89bce5421cae9e21302190e1a8edd685f0995facc654f2760c2035db30c5&width=430&quality=80)
Baghramian is the third woman to receive the prize.
Celebrated by her peers as one of the most respected sculptors of our time, Baghramian uses sculpture and abstraction to revise our relationships to the spaces and architectures we inhabit — including our bodies.
“[Baghramian] has already been engaged with [Nasher] for a while,” says curator Catherine Craft, who has been working with the artist since 2015 for an exhibition at the Nasher this October. “But I think it was the pandemic, and the kinds of vulnerabilities it’s exposed in our bodies, most obviously, but also in how we exist in spaces that we might not otherwise pay much attention to, that [made] her also a timely choice [for the Nasher Prize].”
Knee and Elbow (2020), the artist’s recent commission for the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Mass., poetically suggests these physical vulnerabilities, the ways bodies find themselves in need of support. The chiseled forms of pastel-colored marble evoke porous bone hinged together by a stainless steel surgical pin.
“I was thinking about the joints as prostheses to [try] to understand the inner core of the sculpture,” Baghramian says of the work in a conversation with Museum of Modern Art curator Paulina Pobocha for Ocula magazine.
Interest in the human form
Baghramian, 51, first took an interest in the arts in her teens in Berlin, where she found community in the city’s theater and dance scenes. This early attention to the behavior of the human form influenced her use of the body to understand the dynamic interactions between objects.
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Baghramian’s site-responsive sculptures often take their titles from the body’s essential workers: Knee and Elbow (2020), Flat Spine (2016), Dwindlers (2018) (a reference to the intestines). Glass and resin sheaths, like vertebrae or segments of bowel, travel up the walls or across the floor, mimicking a building’s ductwork. These architectural " innards” are responsible for filtering the building’s air — vital work — but within architecture, they are afforded little formal attention.
Jeremy Strick, the Nasher’s executive director since 2009, told The Dallas Morning News that, “Part of her engagement with the body is also an engagement with the nature and history of sculpture itself.” In directing attention to a system’s supports, whether bodily, architectural or social, Baghramian’s sculptures suggest open-ended questions of visibility, labor and belonging.
![Nasher Prize laureate Nairy Baghramian will accept her award on April 2 in Dallas.](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/NKXN4CIVUJCWZEWYDZFCDP2U4I.jpg?auth=dc9c0e63f6e728b8ac7a8bf4f2de56ebbf623ce4bc9f771d65a4667968a9879d&width=430&quality=80)
These questions remain relevant, as the National Women’s Law Center reported that women suffered the majority of job losses during the pandemic, roughly 63%. As of February 2022, 1.1 million women remain displaced from the workforce.
Like the body, the public sphere isn’t just a physical space; it’s also a gendered one.
At the pandemic’s outbreak, Baghramian returned to her long-standing work at a women’s shelter in Berlin, where many women were navigating a precarious relationship to live and work inside the home.
Attention to the relationship between domestic and public space and design and architecture has been a recurring exploration throughout Baghramian’s three decades as an artist.
“Design has been a realm traditionally considered secondary architecture,” Craft says. “As a result, it’s been a place for women or gay men or others who haven’t perhaps felt welcome in what is supposed to be this loftier discipline.”
A highlight of Baghramian’s multi-year collaboration with the late Swiss designer, artist and activist Janette Laverrière was the pair’s exhibition at the 2008 Berlin Biennale 5 that focused on this binary. Laverrière’s mirrors and bookshelves were positioned as the installation’s central sculptures, while the sculptor designed the fixtures, walls and supports, the space in which the designer’s works were viewed. Domestic rooms functioned as galleries, thus reordering the imposed hierarchical division.
Rakowitz, the outgoing 2020-21 Nasher Prize laureate, has also explored the political potentials of sculpture, albeit far more overtly than Baghramian. Rakowitz held the title for an additional year during the prize’s pandemic hiatus and shares with Baghramian the familial experience of being a political refugee from the Middle East. The American artist’s family escaped to the United States during World War II. His works often pay explicit homage to his Iraqi-Jewish heritage and the experience of exile.
Defying expectations
Baghramian and her family fled Iran in 1985 — six years after the overthrow of the Shahist government — when the artist was only 14. Despite being a refugee, she refuses to make her identity the center of her work: “It was my first political act to oppose this temptation and classification, and not take on the obvious, expected function,” she says.
![Nairy Baghramian's "Drawing Table (Hommage a Jane Bowles)" is a 2017 work featuring waxed...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/S4MGVMJKU5GF7MRFTLZFGMOVCE.jpg?auth=423e0fed7f92adef42bb96c6b44fccc6f1d27d6bf7fdfe0331dafb8db95f07cf&width=830&quality=80)
But don’t confuse this statement with thinking that the artist is apolitical. Far from it.
“I do not believe that a certain group should fulfill the social mandate to relieve society by taking responsibility for history, or to act on behalf of it,” Baghramian says in Ocula. “This burden should be borne by everyone equally; otherwise, we will continue to maintain and establish colonial structures by creating more categories” — categories signaled by titles like Misfits and Stay Downers that the artist uses to draw attention to people who too often get overlooked.
Baghramian’s corporeal forms and provisional prostheses lean against one another, violating the social distance insisted upon by processes of categorization within sculpture. Instead, the objects she creates suggest the possibility of what the artist calls “careful closeness.”
The level of subtlety she achieves through techniques of minimalism and abstraction is masterful, seeming as effortless and unburdened as a dancer in motion. Yet, she never fails to remind us that beneath the skin, there’s a body at work, a leg threatening to quiver, a sculpture teetering slightly off balance. I like to think of Baghramian’s ideas in that way as other muscles, sharing the weight of our exhausted frames for once.
Details
Nairy Baghramian will receive her Nasher Prize at an awards gala on April 2 at 7 p.m. at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., Dallas. Her work is on display at the Nasher through May 1. Museum hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free April 1 and 2 in honor of Baghramian’s prize. On other days, tickets are $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students and teachers, and free for children younger than 12. For more information, visit nashersculpturecenter.org.