MATTHEW BARNEY
SECONDARY (solo presentation)
Booth C20, Art Basel Miami Beach
4 – 8 December 2024
A solo presentation in collaboration with Sadie Coles HQ, Gladstone Gallery, Regen Projects and Galerie Max Hetzler.
Exclusively for Art Basel Miami 2024, Matthew Barney presents a series of unique new sculptures that expand his acclaimed recent project SECONDARY. Barney’s five new Wall Racks are presented alongside drawings from the SECONDARY project, evoking the athletic training space and the physical limits of the body. Working primarily in ceramic, Barney is able to evoke both the sensation of strength and fragility, while memorialising and pathologising the traumatic impact that is the driver of SECONDARY’s narrative.
In this body of work, Barney employs a series of formal tactics that examine the intersection between repetitive physical movement and the iterative artistic gesture. Exploring athletic equipment and team uniforms as evocations for the figure, the artist’s new sculptures examine both failure and resilience within the body. Barney exploits the varying natural qualities of his materials as a metaphor for recovery and collapse. The ceramic plates appear to be caving-in under their own weight, cracking and folding, countering the object’s association with durability. Within this state of duress is a collision of materials – from the entangled jerseys to the fusion of different clay tones. The simultaneous vigour and vulnerability of this action amplifies the connection between physical endurance and breakdown that Barney continues to explore in his wider drawing, painting and film practice.
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MATTHEW BARNEY
The Bitch, Matthew Barney and Alex Katz (duo show)
O’Flaherty’s, New York
7 November – 15 December 2024
O’Flaherty’s, New York, presents a duo exhibition of work by Matthew Barney and Alex Katz. A gripping tale of unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Bitch is a masterfully crafted show, eloquently understated and epic in scope. In New York, a coastal town in North America, The Bitch begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. Here we have two artists who have shaped our understanding of Art. Can Barney and Katz – known for planning before spontaneously executing their work – pull off this flea-flicker? Can they be like light and shadow, giving shape to each other? This exhibition is an exercise in their master craft.
O’Flaherty’s
MATTHEW BARNEY
SECONDARY (solo show)
Fondation Cartier, Paris
8 June – 8 September 2024
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents an exhibition by Matthew Barney, showing his latest video installation: SECONDARY. With this exhibition, the Fondation Cartier celebrates its collaboration with the American artist which began thirty years ago with the co-production of Barney’s first film, Cremaster 4, 1994, in what would become the artist’s iconic body of work, The CREMASTER Cycle.
The SECONDARY exhibition will take place throughout all of the Fondation Cartier’s galleries, and will show for the first time a new sculpture created for the occasion. In addition, the exhibition will include an installation of the earliest DRAWING RESTRAINT video works, providing further context for the new work.The exhibition at the Fondation Cartier is part of a sequence of unique SECONDARY shows scheduled for 2024 at the artist’s representing galleries.
Fondation Cartier
MATTHEW BARNEY
Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2024
We congratulate Matthew Barney on becoming an Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Matthew Barney has been elected into the Department of Arts and will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters during its annual Ceremonial in May 2024.
American Academy of Arts and Letters