Nairy Baghramian. Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points

Nairy Baghramian. Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points
19.01.2019 - 22.09.2019

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presents Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points by Nairy Baghramian. Acquired in 2018 for the Mudam Collection and installed in the museum’s central hall, the sculpture is accompanied by the temporary presentation on the esplanade of the Park Dräi Eechelen of two additional sculptures that make up the series. Their elegant curves punctuate the landscape and open onto the panoramic view of the city of Luxembourg, with the ruins of Vauban’s fortress on one side, and on the other, the steel and glass towers of the Kirchberg plateau.

The three bronze sculptures painted with layers of desaturated yellow, pale yellow-green and pastel coloured green-grey have been cast in the form of irregular open circles of up to five metres in diameter similar to the marking of passages in a text. Baghramian first presented this new series of Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points in Münster in 2017 as part of the 5th edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, in the front and back courtyards of the Baroque Erbdrostenhof palace. In choosing this location she referred to a previous sculptural intervention by Richard Serra from 1987. In contrast to the monumentality and permanence suggested by Serra’s work, Baghramian emphasized the temporary and mobile nature of her sculptures in the context of the temporary exhibition by leaving the sculptures in a state of near completion with the promise of a final form still to be elaborated.

Installed now in Mudam and the Park Dräi Eechelen, Baghramian’s sculptures establish a relationship between interior and exterior space. In both cases, the environment-inspired colouration blends the sculptural bodies with their surroundings. Their three-dimensional twist and hanging droplet formations, which address traditional sculptural questions of mass and weightlessness, form and colour, stability and performativity, and the visible processes of their production, are an invitation to the viewer to interact.

Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points embody formal, conceptual and critical concerns that have characterised Baghramian’s sculptures since she first began exhibiting in the late 1990s. Anthropomorphic affiliations associated with crutches and prosthetic devices, and a concern for placement in relation to marginal and threshold spaces are some of the physical and symbolic connections between architecture, object and human body, and the idea of sculpture as being necessarily dynamic. Together with her broader sculptural oeuvre, which also incorporates photographs and drawings, Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points is part of a repertory of ideas that can be rearranged and reinvented so as to generate changing views according to the space they occupy, and the people who look at them.

Curators: Suzanne Cotter, assisted by Vincent Crapon