Artists

Nairy Baghramian, Alina Szapocznikow

Press release

Alina Szapocznikow / Nairy Baghramian forges a dialog, for the very first time, between two distinctive renowned sculptors whose practices are rooted in an exploration of the body. Surveying the tension between the corporal, mechanical, and biomorphic, the works of these two artists raise questions of touch, pleasure, pain, trauma, and the abject. Organized on occasion of the centenary of Szapocznikow’s birth, the exhibition brings together a representative selection of Szapocznikow’s work across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography, shown alongside recent sculptures, from Baghramian’s Scruff of the Neck (2016) series. Szapocznikow and Baghramian are bound by a shared investment in the human form, and its fragmentation, disassembly, and abstraction. Szapocznikow’s sculptures, which often include casts of her own body as well as of friends and family, maintain the recognizability of the human figure. Baghramian, on the other hand, harnesses abstraction to create bulbous and lumpy anthropomorphic sculptures that might suggest an extremity, such as a leg or thigh. While Szapocznikow isolates elements of the body, Baghramian frequently turns to corrective devices such as braces and prostheses, drawing attention to how the body is supported, corrected, and held in place. Both artists share a fascination with squishy materials such as polyurethane, polyester resin, and rubber, that render the body plastic, pliable and liquid. Highly tactile and textured, these artists’ works remind us of the profound fragility and vulnerability of the human body. The exhibition presents a range of Szapocznikow’s work, made between 1959 and 1972, with an emphasis on her approach to isolating, fragmenting, and proliferating the human form. Small scale sculptures from 1959 to the mid-1960s capture her increased shift from figuration to abstraction through experimentations with textured and distorted shapes suggestive of biological forms, plant matter, and fossils. Her break-through sculpture Leg (1962-1967) marks the first time Szapocznikow created an imprint of her body, a process she would embrace and repeat throughout her oeuvre. The exhibition traces Szapocznikow’s experiments with bronze, cement, car parts and foregrounds a grouping of her pioneering sculptures made with polyurethane and polyester resin. Here, torsos, bellies, and legs in colored resin are embedded into tar-like, oozing polyurethane foam, rendering the body as disintegrating and viscous. Following her 1968 breast cancer diagnosis, Szapocznikow creates the Tumour series, in which she traps underwear, newspaper clippings, and private photographs in resin blobs, creating monuments to her own decay and passing. Finally, the selection concludes with her last series – the Herbier works, in which flattened resin casts of her own face and her son’s body offer powerful considerations of mortality and remembrance. Made in response both to Zachęta’s galleries, as well as the selection of Szapocznikow’s works on view, Baghramian’s Scruff of the Neck series consists of wall-mounted sculptures that contrast highly polished cast aluminum armatures with tooth-like forms made of porcelain plaster, wax, and rubber. The series’ title references the delicate part of the posterior, namely folds of flesh or fur grabbed for the purpose of control, discipline, or movement. The sculptures propose the idea of encountering the gallery from its reverse side—as though one were entering the back of the head and the oral cavity of a body, or of an institution representing the social body. In this sense, Baghramian conceives the representative halls, Sala Matejkowska and Sala Narutowicza at Zachęta, as a pair of jaws or a speech apparatus—a supporting structure that holds together both her own works and those of Szapocznikow, particularly in relation to Alina Szapocznikow’s work Photographic Sculpture. There, the masticatory apparatus serves to manipulate pieces of chewing gum into abstract sculptural formations which, once transferred into the medium of photography, solidify and attain sculptural status. In dialogue with this work, the sculptures from Nairy Baghramian’s Scruff of the Neck series, with their porcelain-plaster-coated devices mounted on curved forms, inevitably evoke associations with dental prostheses and allude to braces, implants, and dental bridges. As sculptural formations themselves, these works point to the potential of sculptural construction and to the multilayered questions posed by abstract sculpture. Also on view is Baghramian’s monumental suspended sculpture Headgear (2016), which combines gleaming aluminum and soft rubber, silicone, fabric and foam. Reminiscent of headgear devices employed to forcibly realign the jaw, the work conjures a large missing head, as if it were seeking to correct the very space it occupies. Hung high in the galleries and overlooking visitors, Baghramian’s sculptures can be thought of as metaphors for control, encouraging us to consider how institutional spaces discipline our behavior and shape our experience of the world. Seen together, the exhibition presents Szapocznikow and Baghramian’s shared engagement with the body, as well as issues of trauma, illness, the abject and grotesque, while also celebrating their shared affinity for humor and irony. Awkward, unconventional, and distinctly individual, works by Szapocznikow and Baghramian defy convention and, in dialogue, expand and celebrate the possibilities of sculpture.