Nairy Baghramian
Handle
2020
Casted aluminium & wax
25 × 25 × 6,5 cm
Edition of 15 copies, signed and numbered by the artist on a certificate
Out of stock
about this work
Nairy Baghramian created a small, abstracted door handle cast in aluminum and laid in a warmish blue wax bed. Without its requisite hardware, the handle is rendered useless and indistinct, although, set perfectly into the wax, it doesn’t appear to be in-tended for real use anyway. Rather, the grabbing and turning of the handle’s form, molded and re-molded by innumerable hands, has been paused for a moment, similar to earlier works by Baghramian such as Maintai-ners or Formage de Tête, to intensify the view of the infrastructural object in relation to spatial economies and hierarchies. As if time had stopped in this nestled sculpture, the relationship between sign and signified, between object and its meaning, is dissolved.
about Nairy Baghramian
Nairy Baghramian explores forms and concepts inherited from the history of art to address issues of functionality, decoration, abstraction, and feminism. Her work offers a reflection on the incessant cycle of aesthetic object production, cultivating an interest in marginalized art forms and spaces that are often considered territory of the “feminine”. Her sculptures —made from a wide range of materials including steel, silicon, resin, and leather— bring art historical references into the realm of the subjective: the human body is dismantled and recombined through the politics of interior design.
The result offers a re-reading of the legacy of Minimalism and Surrealism in the shape of protuberances and cavities, lumps and spills, organs and body parts. Instability, also a recurrent theme in Baghramian’s work, becomes evident in the use of tenuous and flimsy supports to hold and display her sculptures: dangling or leaning, always on the brink of collapse. The strength of her practice lies precisely in revisiting the oft-overlooked and the delicate, using these tropes as a point of departure for sculptures that are aware of their own fragility while comfortably holding sway over the exhibition space.
(courtesy of kurimanzutto)
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