The Met has unveiled four new sculptures by Nairy Baghramian for the Museum’s facade. This is the first public installation for the artist in New York City. Baghramian’s cast aluminum polychrome sculptures feature components that seem to have washed up like flotsam and jetsam in the voids of their respective niches. These abstract forms at the threshold of the Museum present a metaphor of the institution as a filter of historical fragments deemed representative or exemplary.

The project’s title Scratching the Back—a distortion of the idiom “scratch the surface”—alludes to the need to move beyond superficially constructed cultural narratives. 

The Facade Commission: Nairy Baghramian is conceived by the artist in consultation with Akili Tommasino, Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met.