Nairy Baghramian’s “nameless”

Nairy Baghramian’s latest exhibition, divided across two floors, offers a split-screen view of her practice. It begins on the upper floor, opening wide onto an array of small-scale sculptures, maquettes, and drawings in all manner of forms, colors, and materials, displayed on folded aluminum pedestals, or hung on transparent plexiglass walls. The works chatter amongst themselves in an animated conversation expressed in different material languages and formal accents.

Downstairs, on the other hand, is quiet and withdrawn, as if all of the busy thoughts upstairs have been blown away. The center of the room is empty, and no works are on the floor. Left and right, freestanding walls have been wedged at an angle beneath the ceiling beams, tilting slightly as if deciding against the perpendicular and preferring to lean instead. A shelf low down on each wall holds a delicate, translucent pillow-like form: two halves of clear epoxy resin sealed around a void. Sequestered on the reverse of the walls are elongated fragments of wobbly, tubular glass. Some are remnants of neon signage that have been reworked, others are blown glass tubes that grow bulbous at points, like internal organs. Each piece is displayed like a specimen, held tentatively in shiny chrome clamps as if between finger and thumb, and arranged in three-dimensional line-drawings, full of whimsy but also fragile and tremulous. Sometimes an end protrudes beyond the edge of the wall like a beckoning finger. On the room’s outer walls are wooden-framed pictures in which blooms of pigment emerge from within enigmatic surfaces of colored wax.

The upper floor is extroverted while the lower is introverted. Or upstairs is waking hours and downstairs is dreamtime. Reality and ideal. But to set this up as a dichotomy is misleading. They are rather two essential and symbiotic aspects of the artist’s identity and working process. The busy studio activity that accumulates dashed-off thoughts and spontaneous ideas versus the slow concentration and refinement that goes into finishing a new piece. The desire for vocal exchange over time alternates with the need for silent action in the present.

Baghramian has had a strong run of ten solo exhibitions across Europe and the US in as many years, during which time she has been awarded both the Nasher Sculpture Prize (2022) and the Aspen Art Award (2023). Following her acclaimed commission for the facade of New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 2023, this public outing reflects a return to the studio and the ongoing dilemma of artistic production in times of upheaval. Rejecting the term “site-specific,” Baghramian describes her approach as “site-responsive.” Responding to the given conditions of a situation, she is more compelled by awkwardness and disadvantage. The point is to use these circumstances as a set of generative limitations. Hence her decision to stage her new body of work in the lower and darker downstairs space, which lacks the easy grace of the floor above.

The two assemblage-like bodies of work on the upper floor are called “Spatial Compositions” (a title borrowed from early twentieth century Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro) and “Side Leaps.” Baghramian has described “Side Leaps” as studies that “have not been allowed to become sculpture,”1 but the German term from which the title derives (Seitensprung) means an adulterous love affair. The love affairs here are with Baghramian’s artistic forebears: not only Kobro but also Hans Arp, Louise Bourgeois, Marisa Merz, Isamu Noguchi, Charlotte Posenenske, and many others. Residues and allusions teem and chatter as heterogeneous shapes, materials, and colors are mixed and scattered in a cross-generational conversation. Everything is made visible and given attention: hanging devices, display systems, screws and hardware, as well as the backs of works exposed through plexiglass display structures. Beyond the group titles there are no dates nor details of materials to be had, however. Instead there is a vivid simultaneity, not only of Baghramian’s varied production and techniques, but also of her influences.

Influence dissipates and we are left downstairs with the exhalation of individual thought. The clamor is kept outside the door and we enter the artist’s singular mind space, where nothing touches the ground and the walls lean at woozy angles. There is an intimacy to the pillow-like works, called “oreiller,” places on which to rest the ear. The colors of the wax-pigment pictures are like the tones you see when you close your eyes. Called “selves,” Baghramian describes them as portraits. The glass works, titled “Nameless,” approximate letters or scribbled lines but are not quite readable, like attempting to speak in a dream when no words come out. These are rather the kind of undefined interior thoughts that do not adhere to language. The show’s title is also “nameless,” a word which in this case is given form, in a huge illuminated neon sign hanging vertically in the former brewery’s historical silo (nameless_lit, 2025).

Baghramian’s works are as resistant to biographical readings as they are to the fixity of language. The museum wall text states that she is German, born in Iran to an Armenian family. Though her work eschews the specificity of this three-staged cultural displacement, it does allude to the conditions of exile. Exile demands adaptation and flexibility, but also brings with it a perceptual shift. Place, culture, society, language, all appear different when one comes from elsewhere. With time they may be observed from both inside and outside, however, in a perceptual doubling. “Sculpture is never transcendent—it alters itself under the force of circumstance,” she said in a recent interview.2 Here again is the responsive approach, to speak to the conditions of creative production and its necessity under adversity rather than make specific pronouncements or draw up battle lines.