Misshapen, often unfinished, or just a little broken, leaning on crutches or held up with braces, skulkingly unemployed or like lost intellectuals, hitched to each other and their worldviews, debating escape, Nairy Baghramian’s sculptures are held together with surprising humor and spatial intelligence. Angular and sensual, animal and inanimate, ethereal yet and freighted with gravitas of physical presence, sometimes they reflect back on themselves as loose, provisional sketches. In their inchoate and otherworldly shapeliness, I feel like the work of Nairy Bagramian needs us.

Often considered to be one of the crucial voices of queer postconceptual art, Henrik Olesen’s retrospective at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid stages various episodes of a drastic shift in the artist’s attitude, moving from political awareness-raising ever deeper into the intricacies of the self.