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

Nairy Baghramian. Photo by Nan Coulter. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery and kurimanzutto.

ASPEN, COLORADO (May 16, 2023) — Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Director of the Aspen Art Museum, announced a major new exhibition by artist, Nairy Baghramian, to open at the museum on June 22. Baghramian is also announced as the 2023 ArtCrush Artist 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 artist’s 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 continues 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 attitudes; 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 often 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 constriction and release, a theme that will continue to unfold in the galleries through works including Chin Up (First Fitting) (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 often in reference to architecture and the human body. Her work addresses temporal, spatial, and social relationships to language, history, and the present, with forms that 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.

Baghramian has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to create four new sculptures for the prestigious Fifth Avenue’s façade niches, to be unveiled in September 2023. Recent solo shows include those at Carré d’Art, Nimes, France (2022); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2022); Galleria d'Arte Moderna (GAM), Milan, Italy (2021); MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2019); Palacio de Cristal, Madrid, Spain (2018); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium (2016); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2015); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2014); MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2013); Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2012); the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2012); and Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2010).

Baghramian has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Nasher Prize Laureate (2022); the Zurich Art Prize (2016); the Arnold-Bode Prize, Kassel (2014); the Hector Prize, Kunsthalle Mannheim (2012); and the Ernst Schering Foundation Award (2007). She has participated in the Yorkshire Sculpture International at the Hepworth Wakefield, UK (2019); Venice Biennale, Italy (2019 and 2011); Skulptur Projekte Munster, Germany (2017 and 2007); the 8th and 5th Berlin Biennale, Germany (2014 and 2008); and Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Scotland (2012).
 
ABOUT THE ASPEN ART MUSEUM 
Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1979, the Aspen Art Museum is an artist-founded institution dedicated to supporting artists, while being a globally engaged non-collecting contemporary art museum. Following the 2014 opening of the Museum’s facility designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban, the Museum enjoys increased attendance, renewed civic interaction, and international media attention. In July 2017, the Museum was one of ten institutions to receive the United States’ National Medal for Museum and Library Services for its educational outreach to rural communities in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley and its learning partnerships with civic and cultural partners within a 100-mile radius of the Museum’s Aspen location.
 
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Tuesday–Sunday, 10 AM–6 PM 
Closed Mondays 
 
Visit the Aspen Art Museum online: aspenartmuseum.org 
 
Aspen Art Museum ADMISSION IS FREE courtesy of Amy and John Phelan.
 
Aspen Art Museum exhibitions are made possible by the Marx Exhibition Fund. General exhibition support is provided by the Toby Devan Lewis Visiting Artist Fund. Additional support is provided by the Aspen Art Museum National Council. Additional support for Nairy Baghramian: Jupon de Corps is provided by the Aspen Art Museum National Council and Mary & Harold Zlot.