Celebrated sculptor to unveil new shows, recipient of ArtCrush honor

News News | Jul 2, 2023

Aspen Art Museum’s 2023 ArtCrush honoree Nairy Baghramian, known worldwide for enshrining sculpture on a global scale, is at the top of her game.

“I think the Aspen Art Museum is contributing to the artistic community in the U.S. as well as globally in unique and meaningful ways and I am delighted to be part of this important chapter in its history,” said Baghramian, whose curatorial methodology and thought, as well as sculptural works and exhibitions, have made her a model of engagement within the fields of sculpture and exhibition-making.

Amid a bevy of commissions and honors this year, the Iranian-born, Berlin-based sculptor shows no sign of slowing down.

Baghramian’s new major solo exhibition, “Jupon de Corps,” opened June 22 at the Aspen Art Museum and runs through Oct. 22.

“Over the past decades, Baghramian has innovated the fields of sculpture and exhibition-making in unique ways and we are thrilled to be able to present this exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum,” said Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon director of the Aspen Art Museum.

In “Jupon de Corps,” Baghramian doles out orthodontic delicacies of industrial design.

Baghramian will take a bite out of the Big Apple later this year as she debuts a façade at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which tapped her for the commission.

The artist will return to Aspen at the end of July to install an outdoor commission with the Aspen Art Museum.

“This also includes a new site-specific commission which will be shown in the museum’s public commons,” Lees said.

Baghramian will also be honored as the Aspen Art Museum’s 2023 ArtCrush Artist honoree as the museum hosts its annual ArtWeek in Aspen. Baghramian’s honor will cap ArtWeek, which will culminate with the museum’s ArtCrush Summer Gala on Friday, Aug. 4.

“I am thrilled to be the recipient to the Aspen Art Museum Award 2023,” she said. “I am so grateful to the director of the museum, Nicola Lees, whom I have known for a long time, as well as the museum board and the ArtCrush co-chairs for celebrating my practice and offering a platform to present my work to the Aspen community.”

In “Jupon de Corps,” Baghramian’s consideration of the reassemblage of seemingly incongruous materials fits into a unified whole.

“There are recurring motifs across the show which mirror some of the wider concerns in Baghramian’s work, such as her ongoing interest in expressions of bodily attitudes, the symbolic charge of physiognomic corrections and her tireless experimentation with materials of all kinds, including amongst others silicon, steel and wax,” said Lees.

For Baghramian, the pieced parts and holistic whole, the artistic and analytic, the craft and system, the gastronomy and anatomy, the imperfect and correct, the intestinal and external, the interdependence and infrastructure, the ancient archaeologies and modern apparatuses reflect her engagement with disparate materials into one connective body and discourse.

Baghramian’s practice rests somewhere between playfully ironic and inviting.

And as the endearing mad scientist, Baghramian is busy in unabashed fun in her forensic factory amassing natural material ingredients to cook up culinary constructions of sculptural work at a hearty pace that would rival any Michelin kitchen’s production or metropolis’ smokestacks. She focuses her energies in the domains of kinship, interdependency, and reciprocity.

Fueling all of this relentless thought would leave many an artist with troubled intestines and a smoking head.

But Baghramian is cool in the heat of her kitchen. For forming her sculptural recipes, grouping is part and parcel in the processes of her constructions to bind pieces and join elements together in active roles that symbiotically chime harmoniously and heterogeneously together as part of something larger.

“Working with Nairy Baghramian is truly an honor. The collaboration with the artist and her studio has enriched our whole team on many levels, from curatorial thinking to technical production and install,” said Lees.

Her process results in triumph after triumph of modernist, minimalist and surrealist primordial representation that stir numberless readings and thought-provoking dialogue. Baghramian’s shows and exhibitions bear that out.

“We are deeply grateful to Baghramian for her commitment and vision, and we wish to extend our gratitude as well to her studio and all our colleagues at the Aspen Art Museum who have all contributed in some ways to make this project possible,” said Bottai.

Whether in service of her practice or palette, Baghramian sets her sights skyscraper high and is hungry for more.

“I look forward to attending the ArtCrush Gala!” she said.

If you go…What: ArtCrush GalaWhere: Base of Buttermilk MountainWhen: Friday, Aug. 4, 6 p.m.Tickets and more info: aspenartmuseum.org/artcrush

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As Denice Reich writes in “Accepting the Unacceptable: How Betrayal, Setbacks and Failure Created My Success,” to understand her, you have to understand Aspen. Reich’s family moved from Denver to the small town during Denver’s polio epidemic in 1945.

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