Matthew Barney
dal 6/4/2006 al 12/5/2006
Segnalato da
6/4/2006
Matthew Barney
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Are represented three volumes of Drawing Restraint. The drawings and sculptures featured in this exhibition focus on the relationship between the Japanese Hosts and the occidental, the male and female protagonists whose subsequent transformation powers the film's action.
Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matthew
Barney. An acclaimed artist whose conceptual program spans film, sculpture,
photography, drawing, and performance, Barney's pairing of meticulously
developed metaphor with seductive visual rigor has resulted in visionary
masterworks in all media since the early nineties.
This exhibition will consist of sculptures and drawings related to his recent
project DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 and a new action DRAWING RESTRAINT 13. DRAWING
RESTRAINT 9 is the most complex installment in an ongoing series begun in
1987. Barney's motivation for the series is to explore "resistance as a
pre-requisite for development and a vehicle for creativity," drawing parallels
between the biological system of situation/condition/production and the
artistic manifestations of psychosexual drives. The feature film DRAWING
RESTRAINT 9 features Barney and musician Bjork, who also scored the film, as
Occidental Guests aboard a whaling vessel in the Sea of Japan whose seemingly
predestined meeting results in an unconventional romance. Throughout the work,
Barney addresses various themes surrounding the history and culture of Japan
including the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and
the supplantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil.
The drawings and sculptures featured in this exhibition focus on the
relationship between the Japanese Hosts and the titular Occidental Guests, the
male and female protagonists whose subsequent transformation powers the film's
action. From the guests' partaking in a tea ceremony to the historical
backdrop of General MacArthur's lifting of the whaling moratorium, Barney
figures the social, historical, and formal aspects of the host/guest dynamic
as a method of physical and psychological restraint. To this effect, Barney
creates sculptures recalling the architecture of the vessel and the physical
transformations that take place. Large-scale thermoplastic sculptures echo the
host/guest relationship, while functioning as a facility for unrestrained
organic overflow. Relating this discourse in a series of graphite and mixed
media drawings, Barney captures the film's symbology in eroticized images that
chart the effects of physical limitation and libidinal release. The
site-specific performance DRAWING RESTRAINT 13 acts as a formal and thematic
coda for the exhibition.
Opening: 7th April 2006
Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24 Street - New York
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 - 6