In a New Show, Nairy Baghramian Rewrites the History of Sculpture as a History of Statelessness

"When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they commandeered Katarzyna Kobro's Łódź apartment as the artist and her family fled. To make space, they discarded or destroyed many of her sculptures. By 1945, the war had ended, but Kobro was forced to burn the remaining wooden works simply to keep warm through the winter. Today, fewer than 20 works from her oeuvre survive."

"Still, Kobro is remembered for the way her work anticipated postwar concerns, and for how she set out to make work that might rectify Modernism's warring impulses: formal rigor and social utility. For her, the organization of space was very much social and formal at the same time. The resulting works were elegant: undulating abstractions made of painted sheets of steel with no front or back, all sides equal."

"For a new exhibition at Wiels in Brussels, Nairy Baghramian has riffed on some of Kobro's forms, but with crucial interventions: her steel is unpainted, and her variations on the original structures double as plinths, sporting works from throughout Baghramian's own career. By developing this dialogue, the show asks us to rethink not only Baghramian's oevrue, but the entire history of sculpture. The plinths are only one intervention that conjures a predecessor. Here, several Baghramian works pay homage to the numerous artists in history who, like Baghramian and Kobro, sculpted while stateless or displaced."

Katarzyna Kobro lost many sculptures during World War II when Nazi forces commandeered her Łódź apartment, and she burned remaining wooden works to stay warm, leaving fewer than twenty surviving pieces. Kobro sought to reconcile Modernism's formal rigor and social utility by organizing space as simultaneously social and formal, producing undulating painted-steel abstractions with no distinct front or back and minimal floor contact. Nairy Baghramian's WIELS exhibition riffs on Kobro's forms using unpainted steel plinth-like structures that carry works from Baghramian's career and create a dialogue that reconsiders sculpture's history and honors stateless, displaced sculptors.

Read at ARTnews.com