A Sculptor Breaks Through, Taking the Walls Down With Her

But different works strike an eerier be aware, evoking sections of the anatomy — like windpipes or knee joints — or its helps, like prostheses and dental retainers. (The references is also to buildings and their scaffolding, or infrastructure like heating ducts.) She doesn’t conceal the steel hooks, joints, pins or fasteners that join the sections of a sculpture; they’re a part of the work, drawing consideration to the fragility of the composition — or its resilience. Often the items appear to embrace one another.

By shifting consideration, by means of the mechanics of the sculptures, to the mechanics of our bodies or methods, Baghramian diverges from the pursuit, in a lot of abstraction, of type for its personal sake. “Rather than defying use per se, Baghramian’s works ultimately defy us,” the critic Kerstin Stakemeier wrote in Artforum.

Or as Paulina Pobocha, affiliate curator of portray and sculpture at MoMA, put it, Baghramian’s human and social metaphors had been “expanding the Modernist tradition of sculpture by allowing conceptual considerations in through the back door.”

Lately Baghramian has been working with forged aluminum. “It’s very different from bronze,” she instructed me. “It melts faster, it’s friendlier for producers.” She has honed a course of that roughens the completed surfaces and makes them mottled or wrinkled.

She defined the strategy: First she cuts shapes out in polystyrene foam. Then she slices, scrapes and burns the froth — a vigorous, nearly violent course of — to provide an uneven floor. These shapes are then forged by packing them in sand; molten aluminum is poured on, which vaporized the froth and assumes its form. The approach is difficult to regulate, which she welcomes. “It’s rough, and I like that,” she mentioned. “It’s as if the material still has a say.”

If she may, Baghramian added, she would problem the thought of dimensionality itself. “A vertical swimming pool doesn’t exist, but I would like to swim in it,” she mentioned. “There’s no such thing as a horizontal staircase — but I would like to imagine it.”