Aspen Art Museum Summer Magazine 2023

ASPEN ART MUSEUM

SUMMER 2023 EDITION

13

Exhibitions

Paulina Olowska Artist

sculpture, so I felt it related to Nairy’s work as well as the theme. When I saw her installation Scruff of the Neck (2016) in a collection display at Tate Modern last year, it gave me shivers of pride because I really feel that every time, she moves the ancient subject of sculpture forward. She really grabs sculpture and connects it to the oddest things such as dentistry, dog bones, the tongue, skin, lips and so on. It seems to relate to appetite. I want to see her work more and more because every time she touches a new nerve of corporeal sensitivity. Nairy is one of my muses. She’s an absolute artist in a way, and I’m fasci- nated by watching her create work over the last 20 years and seeing her politi- cal engagement, her outspokenness and the way she really stands up for other

artists as well. She is also not afraid to “play with the boys”. She can take on the big guys of sculpture like Claes Oldenburg and Franz West. There can only be one Franz West, right? Don’t fuck with Oldenberg. But Nairy, she does it in her own way. And she’s better.

she worked with the idea of sculpture belonging to the kitchen. So there were tables, reflections, hooks. It reminded me of the film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). There is always a sense of a ques- tion or a proposal in her exhibitions: the role of the artist doesn’t end at all when a work is made. For “Off Broad- way” at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco, she invited other artists to be part of a structure where works would come on and off the “stage”. At that time I had been struggling to renovate a huge neon of a volleyball player on a building in Warsaw. Nairy asked me if I had any work about that, and we chose a neon that said Dancing (2007)—another piece I tried to renovate in Warsaw. It was a good choice because it is like a public

Above Nairy Baghramian, Scruff of the Neck (LL 23/24 & LR 26/27/ 28) , 2016. Courtesy: Tate, London

For a very long time, Nairy and I were always in conversation about our roles as women in art. We came from different backgrounds but we both had a sense of angst, and a desire to change the position of women. She was always inspirational to me in the radicality of her speech, and in the way she looked for answers through connecting to women artists from other generations. I’m a painter, while Nairy approaches things more from the point of view of sculpture: sculp- ture as a body, as a three-dimensional form. But we share a sense of narra- tion, of building a story within a show. In the 2011 Venice Biennale I loved her presentation Formage de tête, in which

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