Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Nairy Baghramian
German, Iranian; 21st-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
27%
TRANSpaintings (seat). 2023. Polyester mesh, acrylic paint, ink, aluminum (with Julie Mehretu)
I've seen some Mehretus that I liked, and from what I remember about those she's more than capable of a.) taking her medium and its history seriously, and b.) registering nonvisual concepts (i.e. the stuff that Contemporary artists are all but required to shoehorn into their work, one way or another) in and as a painting's visible form. All of that's out the window with this wheezing monster. There's no justification from anywhere inside this thing for its departure from straight-up painting (Baghramian made the monstrous frame-apparatus). It falls face-first into the experiential no-man's land between mediums: because it's sculptural the squiggles feel no need to coalesce into anything like an image, and so they remain unformed and (at best) decorative; and because it's painterly the sculpture hardly asserts itself as anything more than a clunky frame. And as if that basic confusion weren't enough, the wall text speaks to a bunch of political content — January 6th, Palestine — that's apparently hidden (like literally, as abstracted photographs) somewhere in the colorful squall. Again, that's standard fare for famous-artist bullshit like this, but given how willfully (and badly) opaque the "painting" is, it almost insults the viewer's intelligence to try and haul meaning in through the back door like this. (TFS, 2026)