NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN RECEIVES MAJOR SOLO EXHIBITION AND ANNOUNCED AS 2023 ARTCRUSH ARTIST HONOREE AT ASPEN ART MUSEUM

Solo Exhibition Jupon de Corps to Open June 22;
Site-Specific Sculpture Commissioned for Museum’s Public Commons;
Aspen Award for Art to be given at ArtCrush Gala on August 4.

Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Director of the Aspen Art Museum, announced a major new exhibiton by artist, Nairy Baghramian, to open at the museum on June 22. Baghramian is also announced as the 2023 ArtCrush ArEst Honoree; she will receive the Aspen Award for Art at the annual ArtCrush Gala on Friday, August 4, co-chaired by Jamie Tisch, Sara Zilkha, and Chandra Johnson.

Aspen Art Museum will present Nairy Baghramian: Jupon de Corps, from June 22 through October 22, 2023. The major solo exhibition, Jupon de Corps brings together significant constellations of artworks made by Baghramian over the past decade for the first time. Displayed across two floors, the exhibition establishes a personal and poetic dialogue between key works from the artists output, alongside a new body of sculptures specially conceived for the museum’s outdoor commons. Born in Iran in 1971, Baghramian fled to Berlin, Germany, in 1984, where she continnues to live.

Later in the summer, Baghramian will be honored at the museum’s long-running ArtCrush Gala, which takes place the first week of August during the third annual Aspen ArtWeek. For nearly two decades, the ArtCrush Gala has been the largest annual fundraiser for the Aspen Art Museum, with proceeds supporting innovative exhibitions and dynamic educational programs that impact both local and international communities. Further details on Aspen ArtWeek programming will be announced later this spring.

Nicola Lees said, “We are thrilled to honor Nairy Baghramian with the 2023 Aspen Award for Art and look forward to her work playing a central role in our annual Aspen ArtWeek. The solo exhibition Jupon de Corps will highlight Baghramian’s ongoing work in pushing the boundaries of sculpture and provoking questions about our bodies and the spaces they inhabit. We are especially pleased that a commissioned outdoor sculpture will have pride of place on the museum’s public commons as we go beyond our walls to engage the Aspen community and set the tone for ArtWeek.”

Jupon de Corps brings to the fore foundational aspects of Baghramian’s practice, such as the artist’s sustained dialogue with art historical traditions of the twentieth century; her ongoing interest in expressions of bodily aZtudes; the symbolic—social and psychological—charge of prosthetic and mechanical apparatuses deployed in physiognomic corrections; as well as her tireless experimentation with a wide array of materials, ranging from steel to silicon, resin, leather, wax, and wood.

Works in varying scales will be installed to create intimate and, at times, uncanny atmospheres in which fragmented forms evoke bodily environments. As o\en in Baghramian’s work, many of the sculptures will appear in clusters, establishing visual and physical connections with each other and with the existing infrastructure of the museum’s architecture. Hanging within the museum’s iconic stairwell, Headgear (2016) will form part of a broader investigation into the dynamics of constric?on and release, a theme that will con?nue to unfold in the galleries through works including Chin Up (First Fi5ng) (2016) and Scruff of the Neck (2016).

Aspen ArtWeek and the ArtCrush Gala are presented by Sotheby’s and Prada with additional support from Steven Shane of Compass Real Estate, JP Morgan Private Bank, Tata Harper, UOVO, and CULTURED.

ABOUT NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN

Nairy Baghramian was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1971. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 1984. Baghramian’s work comprises sculpture and installation o\en in reference to architecture and the human body. Her work addresses temporal, spatial, and social relationships to language, history, and the present, with formsthat materialize in response to contextual conditions or the premises of a given medium. These structures offer the possibility of an open and discursive dialogue in response to a site, or a freeing of the assigned relationship between an object and its meaning.