Aspen Art Museum Summer Magazine 2023

ASPEN ART MUSEUM

MAGAZINE

12

Exhibitions

Susanne Titz Director, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany

the public presentation of art as some- thing that needs to be determined and argued for by the artists themselves. This chimed so closely with ideas I had about the rewriting of art history since 1960. At that time, artists were much better informed than the curators, art historians and critics, and in a way, they taught everybody to change the modes of exhibition and the terms of art production and art presentation. I think Nairy is an artist who always reflects all of this, while also present- ing sculpture that is itself, formally, so autonomous, so seductive. Her work creates a discourse around objects and the sculptural process that she is undertaking.

When I invited her for a solo exhibi- tion, Nairy responded that it would be much better to work in a constella- tion. The show we eventually planned, “Open Dress” (2014–15), with Lukas Duwenhögger, Lutz Bacher and Danh Võ, was more like a play: the museum was the stage, and it happened in four rehearsals. I like the term “rehearsal” because every part of the exhibition was in a state of flow. It was not set, showing the audience: “This is it, this is the result”. Instead the audience was invited to think about the possible reasons for what was there. For the first rehearsal we hung Lukas Duwenhögger’s paintings, which were rarely seen at that time, alongside other half-unwrapped works and crates. On the floor was Lutz Bacher’s Big Boy (1992)—a work based

on a puppet used in therapy sessions with kids who have been abused and who are not able to speak about things—but which has been scaled up about ten times. There was a 15th century Portuguese Christ figure in Danh Võ’s Dirty Dancing (2019) installa- tion, and Nairy’s table sculpture from Formage de tête (2011), which always reminds me of an autopsy table or a butcher’s shop. Everything looked so rough and raw and so physical—very fleshy, in a way. For the subsequent rehearsals we produced a number of other scenes with the same objects. I think when Nairy was working on “Open Dress” she was concerned with how artists were being controlled or defined by others and being put in a po- sition where they couldn’t define their own exhibitions. She was thinking of

Above Nairy Baghramian, Vierte Wand/Zwei Protagonistinnen , 2005. Courtesy: Wilhelm Schürmann Collection, Herzogenrath; photograph: Thor Broedreskift

I first saw Nairy’s work when she had an amazing installation titled Fourth Wall/Two Female Protagonists (2005) as part of her solo show at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Germany, that year. I realized she was thinking about the way a work can be both art and display as well. This interested me because I felt she was producing the entire space, as both artist and cura- tor—an approach that connects to the Museum Abteiberg’s history. Artists collaborated with Johannes Cladders during his directorship here (1967–85), as a way of thinking about the institu- tion, thinking about the role of art in the public sphere.

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