Twenty years after staging her first institutional solo at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2006, Berlin-based artist Nairy Baghramian returns to the city as an Art Basel Gold Awardee with a new commission for the Messeplatz, the public plaza in front of the Swiss fair.

Spanning the square’s habitually overlooked fountain, Baghramian’s site-responsive work, Modèle vivant (S’empilant) (2026), rhythmically unfolds as an assembly of four large-scale sculptures that revisit and extend her distinctive artistic language, combining abstract yet highly allusive shapes with geometric apparatuses. Baghramian invites fair visitors and the general public to encounter an agglomeration of aluminum casts appearing as loosely biomorphic forms. These ‘bundles’, as Baghramian calls them, are stacked in certain areas of the installation, as suggested by the French ‘S’empilant’ of the title. All of these components are painted in a light lavender hue with subtle patches of pastel color. The amorphous shapes, despite their considerable volume and weight, seem to balance precariously on fragmented armatures that traverse the fountain without interrupting its water features. Executed in polished stainless steel, these grid-like structures (or, as Baghramian calls them, ‘spines’) sport hooks and other protruding devices, signaling a yet unrealized supportive or even prosthetic function.

Instead of participating in the tradition of fountain figures, with its penchant for poses, gestures, and sensuousness (notably – and morbidly – deconstructed in Bruce Nauman’s ‘Three Heads Fountain’ works from 2005), Baghramian’s forms intimate bodies that are not yet fully composed or defined: multipart bodies in need of armatures and in a state of both respite and suspense.

Since the turn of the millennium, Baghramian has developed a distinct and multifaceted body of work. Her practice traverses the realms of photography, drawing, installation, curatorial projects, and, most notably, sculpture with unyielding experimentation (in terms of materials, procedures, and display devices), critical clairvoyance, and historical acumen. Time and again, her meticulously made objects have confronted viewers (and their dispositions and expectations) with the presence, obstinacy, and mutability of all bodily existence and experience.

The ‘Modèle vivant’ series probes the tradition of drawing, painting, or sculpting from a live model and includes sculptures, reliefs, and photographs. It was first exhibited at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2022, followed by a show at kurimanzutto in Mexico City in 2023 and a presentation at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York in 2024. The series is paradigmatic of Baghramian’s continuous commitment to reflecting and gauging the principles and parameters, circumstances and conditions, processes and procedures, economies and epistemologies of contemporary sculpture.

Baghramian’s outdoor sculpture S’adossante (Pauline) (2023), shown in the Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2023 to 2024, assembled recumbent, leaning, and hanging forms, painted in a light rosy hue. Together, these forms offered ambivalent approximations of, and allusions to, a feminine gestalt in the longue durée of neoclassical sculpture’s engagement with the Odalisque, Venus Victrix, or Olympia confidently on self-display. At the same time, it was necessarily subjected to the violence of the spectatorial gaze.

The subsequent group ‘Modèle vivant (Se ployant)’, presented at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich in the summer of 2024, provided counter-models insofar as these sculptures evoked split and torn bodies that seemed to withdraw and recline under the pressures exerted on their individual elements, both literally by sculptural masses and figuratively by social ones.

Intimating bodies resting, perching, and lingering in advance of being reshuffled and reorganized, Baghramian’s latest incarnation for the Messeplatz might best be described as being suspended between these previously explored poles of exposure and retreat. This is palpable not only in the sculptures’ compact composition, but also in the mostly empty and thus still-available space (to be employed and occupied) on the armatures reaching across the fountain and serve as the works’ integral undergirding. The built-up biomorphic forms are at the cusp of being reassembled for alternative groupings, poised to morph into different formations, waiting to become other bodies (of work) in the imminent future, and maybe even in another place.

In this respect, the Messeplatz project recalls Baghramian’s contribution to Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, ‘Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points’, for which she installed an open ring made of bronze and painted a grayish blue in front of the Erbdrostenhof, a palatial baroque residence, in order to demarcate one of the principal sites of the exhibition. Two fully disassembled and stacked-up variants, coated only with a white primer, were installed in the building’s rear courtyard. In both instances, the artist suggested the possibility of the work’s afterlife beyond the initial context of exhibition and reception. By the same token, the sculpture in Münster (like the one in Basel) programmatically resisted (as has often been the case since Entr’acte, Baghramian’s decidedly unassuming contribution to Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007) the logic of the monument and its lasting influence on the practice and theory of site-specificity and public sculpture at large.

Flies have been a recurring motif in the ‘Modèle vivant’ series since its inception. In the work for the Messeplatz, the tiles that cover the one entirely vacant metal armature stretching over the fountain appear to swarm with photographic imprints of flies, as does the surface of a bench-like pedestal offered as a place to sit beside the fountain. When contemplating the assembly, viewers inadvertently join these images of a disinterested and unstable population. These allegorical insects simultaneously mirror the dynamism of the precisely arranged sculptural elements and can serve as stand-ins for viewers gathering in ever-shifting formations and compositions too. This detail only emphasizes that Baghramian’s sculptures capture an intermediate corporeal stage ripe with the potential for change and reform. In this complex configuration, the artist’s intervention reconsiders the relationship between sculpture, site, self, and spectator within the context of Art Basel – as well as anticipating its already impending aftermath.