Nairy Baghramian Rewrites Art History 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. Her shapes often made surprisingly minimal contact with the floor, appearing both solid and weightless at the same time. 

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.

Working in sculpture, the least portable medium, can seem an impractical choice for those without stability. Yet Baghramian gathers enough examples—Isamu Noguchi, Louise Bourgeois, Jean Arp—to suggest that the human impulse to leave a material trace may be heightened, not hindered, by precarity.

None of the works in the exhibition are titled or dated, and no references are spelled out, aside from general mentions of Arp, Noguchi, and Kobro in the brochure. Devotees of art history will enjoy finding the Easter eggs and mapping the names onto forms; everyone else will enjoy the playful materials and the gorgeous shapes. When Baghramian references another artist, she riffs rather than copies. One Arp-esque shape, for instance, swaps the original artist’s solid forms for a more pliant material in brilliant cerulean. Born in Alsace, a then-disputed territory on the border of Germany and France, Arp’s nationality was contested. He was conscripted for the German army in World War I but refused, claiming madness and statelessness. In 1929, his wife, Sophie Tauber-Arp, built the couple a home and studio in Paris. Feeling settled there, he started making freestanding sculptures for the first time, but he was soon displaced during the German occupation, then relocated to Switzerland as a refugee. He swapped his German name, Hans, for its French equivalent, Jean, and after World War II, finished out his career in Paris. Working without borders, it is often said, enabled him to shuttle between artistic silos, too. 

Beneath this work, on a low, Kobro-y plinth, Baghramian offers her version of a stone Noguchi: two trapezoidal crevices mirror one another inside of a concrete rectangle, reinforced by polished steel bars poking out of one side. Nearby, three shapes emulating the bases of Noguchi’s furniture designs lie haphazardly in a vitrine. Noguchi too lived a life displaced. He voluntarily entered Poston, a Japanese internment camp, in 1942, despite being exempt as an East Coast resident, believing he could improve conditions there through design. In the end, the authorities did not support this endeavor, and delayed his departure by several months. The experience is said to have permeated his later work, which often carry an undercurrent of alienation.

None of the abstractions Baghramian references are easily described as personal, yet each surely bears marks of its maker. Baghramian offers none of their stories in the show, nor her own, though all are easy to find. Born in Iran to Armenian parents, she relocated to East Berlin at 13 as a political refugee, living stateless in the city for years before eventually becoming a German citizen. She has long made a point of keeping her biography distinct from her sculpture, wary of reductive readings and protective of her family’s privacy. But recently, while making S’addousant (Pauline), 2023, she was cutting and burning peachy polystyrene foam when a repressed memory resurfaced—that of the her mother describing ghastly burns on the body of a family friend who had been murdered in prison. Form and biography, she seems to have realized, cannot be so neatly cleaved; neither, it stands to reason, can formal and political art.

This is Baghramian’s first major show of new work since that 2023 revelation, and it’s easy to feel its impact. This show presents new work but also features pieces from earlier moments in her career, and one wonders if she came to see this older work in a new vein. There’s a printing plate that the curator, Dirk Snauwaert, suspects is from her time as a student in London, though even he wasn’t told titles or dates. There’s a delightful homage to work by the late Art Deco designer Janette Laverrière, who insisted on making useless objects. Blue limblike forms—perhaps evoking the displaced Louise Bourgeois—dangle from a plinth with drawings attached to its flat surfaces, then boxed in with plexiglass. And photographs show disorienting close-ups of the work on the show’s lower floor.

That lower floor is considerably more withholding, austere in tone. Entering, you’ll see only a pair of cast glass pillows flanking a wide, blank gulf. Wandering through, you’ll eventually find works on the verso of oddly angled white walls. Turning each corner, you never know if you’ll find something or nothing. Here, Baghramian presents pieces that flirt with imagery yet remain resolutely material: waxy gradients fill wooden frames, with popped bubbles leaving holes that remind you this work was not made on the wall but rather laid horizontal, that any image is not on the surface but quite literally runs deep. Intricate lattices of neon tubes, recognizable as the raw stuff of signs, refuse to signify. Burned ends and saggy shapes are suspended by eccentric metal armatures. The show is titled “nameless,” evoking all that exists outside of language. One wall leans onto another, such that you have to strain to see. Using the stuff of images, Baghramian taunts legibility she denies. 

Where the upper floor offers a clear narrative of artistic lineage and displacement, the lower level denies any such easy read, insisting instead on the stubborn, irreducible presence of material—perhaps switching tenses, and looking instead toward the medium’s future.