Nairy Baghramian Transforms Art Basel's Messeplatz With a Major New Commission

At a moment when art fairs are increasingly interrogating their own cultural weight, few commissions carry as much conceptual load as this one. In 2025, Nairy Baghramian was named a Gold Awardee in the inaugural Art Basel Awards, which led to the commission of "Modèle vivant (S'empilant)" (2026), a large-scale site-responsive installation for the Messeplatz fountain in front of the Swiss fair.

Born in Isfahan, Iran in 1971, Baghramian has become internationally known for her contextual approach to exhibition-making via sculpture and photography in a site-responsive practice that plays off the body and its supportive functions. She fled post-revolutionary Iran as a teenager and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1984. Her training spanned the Universität der Künste and Freie Universität in Berlin, and Goldsmiths College in London — a multidisciplinary formation that shows clearly in her work.

Baghramian makes sculptures that resist easy resolution: works that balance fragility against structure, humor against critique, and the artist's hand against the autonomy of the object itself. This tension sits at the heart of her philosophy. In Art Basel's "Meet the artists" film series, she articulated the distinction clearly: "I understood very early on the difference between an artwork and the idea of a prop. A prop on the stage is the result of a narration. An artwork, however, contains the narration within itself."

That conviction shapes "Modèle vivant (S'empilant)" directly. Conceived for the square's fountain, the work unfolds as a rhythmic assembly of four large-scale sculptural groupings combining biomorphic forms with geometric support structures. Abstract yet highly allusive aluminum casts, painted in a soft lavender tone, appear stacked and precariously balanced on polished steel armatures traversing the fountain without interrupting its water features. The work extends across the 60-meter-long fountain and incorporates a 48-meter sculptural bench that welcomes Art Basel visitors and residents alike to pause for a moment.

The installation combines Baghramian's signature biomorphic forms and geometric support structures to create what she describes as "a release for the busy art audience" — a place where people can simply rest, wait for a tram, or engage with the artwork on their own terms. That openness is deliberate. Her practice has long been driven by curiosity rather than mastery, and the Messeplatz work is no exception.

The commission comes off the back of Baghramian's Gold Medal at the inaugural 2025 Art Basel Awards, presented in recognition of a body of work that has evolved over 25 years and continues to explore the uncategorisable zone between gesture and feeling. Asked about the weight of the "established artist" designation, she was characteristically direct. The award brings a responsibility "to remain attentive and rigorous," she says — "but though I am more than grateful to be called an established artist, who really wants to be established?"

Her works are held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Walker Art Center, Tate Modern, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo presentations have moved between WIELS in Brussels in 2025, the South London Gallery in 2024, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Façade Commission in 2023.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Baghramian will no longer be able to deliver a planned talk. It will be replaced by a panel discussion on her practice, featuring Paulina Pobocha, Chair and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and art historian André Rottmann. This marks the first time that new commissions by artists honored at the Awards will premiere in the city where their recognition first took place.

The Messeplatz work, situated where thousands pass daily during fair week, does not demand attention so much as invite it. For an artist whose practice is built on the idea that objects carry their own narratives, placing sculpture in a shared civic square — among tram riders and fair visitors alike — is a provocation and a generosity at once.