A Sculptor Breaks Through, Taking the Walls Down With Her

But different works strike an eerier observe, 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 cover the metallic 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, via the mechanics of the sculptures, to the mechanics of our bodies or techniques, Baghramian diverges from the pursuit, in a lot of abstraction, of kind 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 solid aluminum. “It’s very different from bronze,” she advised 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 tactic: First she cuts shapes out in polystyrene foam. Then she slices, scrapes and burns the froth — a vigorous, virtually violent course of — to provide an uneven floor. These shapes are then solid by packing them in sand; molten aluminum is poured on, which vaporized the froth and assumes its form. The approach is difficult to manage, which she welcomes. “It’s rough, and I like that,” she mentioned. “It’s as if the material still has a say.”

If she might, Baghramian added, she would problem the concept 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.”