Nairy Baghramian unveils site-specific installation at Messeplatz, Basel; Gold Awardee for Art Basel
Artist extraordinaire Nairy Baghramian takes over Messeplatz | Art Basel
Twenty years after staging her first institutional solo at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2006, Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian returns to the city as an Art Basel Gold Awardee with a new commission for the Messeplatz, the public plaza in front of the Swiss fair.
Spanning the square’s habitually overlooked fountain, Baghramian’s site-responsive work, Modèle vivant (S’empilant) (2026), rhythmically unfolds as an assembly of four large-scale sculptures that revisit and extend her distinctive artistic language, combining abstract yet highly allusive shapes with geometric apparatuses. Baghramian invites fair visitors and the general public to encounter an agglomeration of aluminum casts appearing as loosely biomorphic forms. These ‘bundles’, as Baghramian calls them, are stacked in certain areas of the installation, as suggested by the French ‘ S’empilant ’ of the title. All of these components are painted in a light lavender hue with subtle patches of pastel color. The amorphous shapes, despite their considerable volume and weight, seem to balance precariously on fragmented armatures that traverse the fountain without interrupting its water features. Executed in polished stainless steel, these grid-like structures (or, as Baghramian calls them, ‘spines’) sport hooks and other protruding devices, signaling a yet unrealized supportive or even prosthetic function.
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