DALLAS, Texas (July 11, 2022)—The Nasher Sculpture Center announces its fall 2022 exhibition artists: Nairy Baghramian and Matthew Ronay. In two large-scale installations, the artists each present entirely new work. Baghramian’s exhibition, organized by Curator Dr. Catherine Craft, will feature new sculptures alongside pieces from the Nasher permanent collection. Organized by Associate Curator Dr. Leigh Arnold, Ronay’s 23-foot-long sculpture will be the artist’s largest installation yet.
Nairy Baghramian
October 15, 2022 – January 8, 2023
Over the past three decades, Baghramian has delved into elements of sculptural practice and installation to create works that challenge their settings and upend expected modes of presentation as well as the architectural, sociological, political, and historical contexts that inform them.
Baghramian has considered the relation of modeling, molding, and casting—interrelated elements of sculpture production involving positive and negative forms—throughout her career, and she consistently humanizes this largely mechanical process through overt or oblique references to the body. Using an abstract vocabulary that often combines geometric and organic forms, as well as industrial materials and processes with elements that appear soft and supple, Baghramian highlights the subtle ligatures uniting disparate human activities and the vulnerability of the human body.
For her Nasher exhibition, Baghramian will create a new series of sculptures that explore the provisional body as the site of trauma by disrupting the habits of the conditioned eye. The sculptures will be presented in dialogue with works from the Nasher’s permanent collection.
Nairy Baghramian is a German citizen born in 1971 in Iran. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 1984. Her work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions in an array of institutions, including Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France (2022); Secession, Vienna AT (2021); GAM, Galleria d'arte Moderna, Milan (2021); MUDAM, Luxembourg (2019); Festival d’ Automne á Paris at École des Beaux-Arts (2018); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2018); SMK, Copenhagen (2017); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); S.M.A.K, Ghent (2016); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2015); Museo Serralves, Porto (2014); the Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Serpentine Gallery with Phyllida Barlow (2010); Studio Voltaire London (2009); and Kunsthalle Basel (2006). Baghramian also participated at Venice Biennale (2019 and 2011); Yorkshire Sculpture International (2019); documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017); Skulptur Project Muenster (2017 and 2007); Lyon Biennale (2017); Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Scotland (2012); and the Berlin Biennale, Germany (2014 and 2008). Baghramian was the winner of the 2022 Nasher Prize. She was also a nominee of the Hugo Boss Prize 2020 and has been the recipient of the Malcolm-McLaren-Award with Maria Hassabi (2019); the Zurich Art Prize (2016); the Arnold-Bode Prize, Kassel (2014); the Hector Prize, Kunsthalle Mannheim (2012); the Ernst Schering Foundation Award (2007). Her works are held in institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; Jumex Museum, Mexico City; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nairy Baghramian is made possible by support from ifa.
Matthew Ronay: The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode
October 22, 2022 – January 15, 2023
Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Ronay is best known for his chromatic, handmade wood sculptures that at different turns suggest otherworldly landscapes with futuristic architectures and bodily processes like digestion and aging. For his exhibition in the Nasher’s Lower Level Gallery, Ronay expands the scale of his work to create his largest and most ambitious sculpture to date. Titled The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode, the 23-foot-long sculpture offers a comprehensive introduction to Ronay’s surreal worlds and the various creatures inhabiting them. Representing that tension between abstraction and representation, the various connected elements in The Crack achieve what Ronay describes as “the razor’s edge of familiar and unfamiliar; you think you’re seeing something, but you’re not quite sure.”
Ronay’s sculptures begin as drawings, materialized first on notebook pages in pencil, before going on to become enlarged in charcoal, then translated into three dimensions. This relationship between two and three dimensions is evident in the front-to-back orientation of his sculptures, with the “front” determined by its position in the corresponding drawing. Both the scale and frontality of The Crack relate the sculpture to architecture, with its narrative elements recalling an ancient frieze. An amalgam of nearly three dozen drawings the artist made over the previous three years and containing a multitude of leitmotifs recontextualized and reimagined in new compositions, colors, and textures, Ronay’s The Crack represents a culmination of nearly a decade of thinking, making, and creating.
A lavishly illustrated catalogue with essays by exhibition curator and Nasher Associate Curator Dr. Leigh Arnold and Clark Art Institute Associate Curator of Contemporary Projects, Robert Wiesenberger, will accompany the exhibition.
Matthew Ronay was born in 1976 in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art before earning his MFA from Yale University in 2000. Ronay has exhibited at institutions including Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany; University of Louisville, Kentucky; Artspace, San Antonio, Texas; Serpentine Gallery, London; Sculpture Center, New York; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky; and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. Ronay participated in the 2013 Lyon Biennale, curated by Gunnar Kvaran, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2016, his work was the subject of solo-presentations at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida.