On display at the GAM in Milan until September 26 Misfits, solo exhibition of the visual artist Nairy Baghramian that for the first time approaches marble.
“Nairy Baghramian – writes Bruna Roccasalva, curator of the exhibition Misfits – has been carrying on for two decades a rigorous formal and conceptual research that explores the relationship between architecture, object, and human body. Her reflection on the political potential of the sculptural form also supports the importance of the physicality of the work, capable of embodying ideas and theoretical presuppositions through the formal, material, and exhibition specificities that distinguish it.”
The exhibition is divided into five rooms, each of which houses a sculptural element, and continues on the terrace adjacent to the rooms. Each of the works on display consists of two halves, made with different materials – painted aluminum castings and wood for the elements that are inside, marble for those outside – and installed as if they were disjointed parts of a possible whole. The decomposed elements of these sculptures seem to evoke the typical structure of certain playful objects based on the interlocking of geometric shapes.
With Misfits the artist born in Iran and based in Berlin, approaches for the first time a noble material such as marble, always a symbol of completeness and perfection. Thanks to the collaboration with the Henraux Foundation she took the opportunity to know the history, extraction and processing processes. The choice to use it was anything but casual, explains the curator: employing marble to give sculptural shape to imperfection, Baghramian questions any pre-constituted idea of beauty and shape, suggesting that even the sculpture should have “the possibility of not meeting expectations”.
Furla Series – Nairy Baghramian. Misfits is the result of the collaboration between Fondazione Furla and GAM-Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano, with the contribution of the Henraux Foundation for the production of marble works.