Matthew Barney’s celebrated film Redoubt, 2018, will be screened at Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, on Thursday 26 October from 7 to 9 pm.

Astrup Fearnley Museet

Ida Ekblad and Matias Faldbakken will participate in ReCollect!, a new project which invites contemporary artists to curate parts of the Kunsthaus Zürich’s permanent collection. In presenting the museum’s collection in dialogue with their own works, the artists seek to question and reshape the established canon. For ReCollect!, Ekblad and Faldbakken will collaborate for the first time, creating a joint installation in which they interpret selected works from the Kunsthaus Collection, as seen through their own artistic practice. Their gestures open up new perspectives on the way the holdings are displayed and bring the work of women artists into focus. Alongside Ekblad and Faldbakken, Peruvian artist Daniela Ortiz and the Swiss collective Hulda Zwingli have also been invited to participate in the series.

Kunsthaus Zürich

When Albert Oehlen set out as a painter in the late 1970s, it was a time out of joint. Given German history, terrorism, 'No Future,' and Nineteen-Eighty-Four as well as the permanent threat of all-out nuclear war, painting could not pretend that the world was safe and sound. As the world shattered, so did painting. As all symbols, signs, and means were damaged and devoid of meaning, he unmasked painting in all its dubiousness. How is one to tell authentic gesture from blunt reproduction, genuine emotion from a disillusioned readymade copy? Oehlen accepts the shattering and transforms it into the basis of his painting. He invents an overtly fragmented image, which is as disoriented as the reality, in which it partakes. Traces, stimuli, and after-images of reality flash stroboscopically across his canvases. It is through this attitude that he has achieved an exceptional degree of painterly liberty, With each new image, he updates and renews the possibilities and impossibilities of painting, thereby granting an appropriate form to a diffuse reality. 

For the first time, Albert Oehlen has created an expansive all-over installation, spanning the entirety of the Friedrichs Foundation’s exhibition hall, into which 12 paintings have been playfully integrated.

Friedrichs Foundation

On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from 23 July, Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) is a seminal installation from his breakout solo exhibition Facility of DECLINE at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, in 1991. The room-sized sculptural installation features two videos in which Barney performs strenuous acts of athletics with unorthodox outcomes: Radial Drill, 1991, and Blind Perineum, 1991. The central space features sculptural components that draw from the exercise equipment and materials used in wrestling, some of which are fashioned out of transmutable elements such as cast petroleum wax and petroleum jelly. Recently acquired by LACMA, REPRESSIA (decline) established Barney’s visual language and anticipates the corporeal drive of his Cremaster cycle of five films, all of which feature performance across different sites and timelines.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Albert Oehlen’s monumental sculpture Ömega Man, 2023, is now on view to the public in Weidingen, where it emerges from the vast landscape of the Südeifel. Its simplified form and slightly raised steel bars, recessed into their concrete casting, evoke the lightness of a drawing. Here, the persistent importance of the line in Oehlen’s work becomes evident, appearing simultaneously curved and controlled. In this work, the artist uses elements which are both abstract and figurative to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, all the while continuing to acknowledge the importance of classical models. Massive yet fragile in its isolation, Oehlen's Ömega Man appears like a monument from the future. Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, is here written with an umlaut, thereby referring to the artist’s own name. 

Stiftung zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen

Thomas Struth’s The Charles Family, Berlin 2021, 2021, is included in the group exhibition (WAHL-)Familie. Die, Die Wir Sind at Kunstmuseum Ravensburg. Bringing together works by fourteen contemporary artists revolving around the topic of family, the exhibition asks how we define belonging and paints a multi-layered picture of what family can be. 

Kunstmuseum Ravensburg

Crosstown Traffic, a new large-scale mosaic by Christopher Wool, is now permanently installed in the lobby of Two Manhattan West across from Moynihan Station in New York City. The mosaic, at 28 by 39 feet, is the artist's first in the medium and his largest artwork to date. Wool’s work is presented alongside a new stainless-steel sculpture by artist Charles Ray, both of which were commissioned by Brookfield Properties.

Thomas Struth’s photograph Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh, Windsor Castle 2011, 2011, will be on view as part of the exhibition Inspiring People. Transforming the National Portrait Gallery, the Inspiring People project comprises a complete re-presentation of the Collection, combined with a significant refurbishment of the building, the creation of public spaces, a more welcoming visitor entrance and public forecourt, and a new Learning centre. The Gallery reopens to the public on 22 June 2023.

National Portrait Gallery

On the occasion of its reopening after extensive renovation, the Medizinhistorisches Museum Charité in Berlin will present a special exhibition focused on neurological themes in science and art. Struth’s work Figure II, Charité, Berlin 2013, 2013, will be on view. 

Medizinhistorisches Museum Charité

Works by Thomas Struth will be on view in Capturing the Moment, at Tate Modern, London. Exploring the dynamic relationship between painting and photography, the exhibition presents some of the greatest painters and photographers of the modern era, examining how the brush and the lens have been used to capture moments in time. 

Tate Modern

Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum 1, Berlin, 2001, 2001, is included in the group exhibition Civilization: The Way We Live Now, on view at the Saatchi Gallery, London, from 2 June 2023.

The exhibition tracks the visual threads of humanity’s ever-changing, extraordinarily complex life across the globe, through the eyes of 150 of the world’s most accomplished photographers. Featuring many previously unseen images, Civilization acknowledges the diverse material and spiritual cultures that make up global societies today, spanning Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas. Exploring a wide range of subjects, from our great united achievements to our collective failings, the exhibition highlights the complexity and contradictions of contemporary civilization.

Saatchi Gallery

Six monumental cast iron sculptures by Ida Ekblad will be presented in the artist’s solo exhibition Strange Freedoms Shall Be Sought. Ekblad pays tribute to the long and rich history of iron as an ancient material which is traditionally used in Norway to cast stoves. Until the 20th century, these stoves were often decorated with reliefs of fairytale figures or religious symbols designed by Norwegian artists and architects. Ekblad continues this tradition in her minimalistic and monumental designs. A closer look reveals elaborate reliefs, silhouettes on feet and pipes, and mysterious phrases that draw the viewer into the artist’s genre-breaking universe.

KODE Art Museum

Ida Ekblad’s sculpture BOOK OF BOREDOM, 2022, is now on view as part of ARTZUID, the leading Sculpture Biennale of the Netherlands. Bringing together fifty sculptures by internationally renowned artists on Amsterdam’s Apollolaan and Minervalaan, the eight edition of ARTZUID reflects the theme of Transfer.

Ekblad's monumental painted bronze sculpture combines fragments from the artist’s expressive paintings. Conveying a rich sense of abundance and corporality, the work presents a vibrant composition filled with fragmented, angular patterns and shapes, merging elements of figuration and abstraction.

Metrograph is proud to announce ‘Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle and Select Early Works’, bringing Barney's iconic Cremaster Cycle back to New York over the course of four evenings and a special one-night engagement of re-mastered early works. The first screening in the series will take place on Wednesday, 17 May with Cremaster 4 and Cremaster 1. 

Of The Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney’s nine-year cinematic undertaking that would help cement his place as one of the premier art world figures to emerge in the 1990s, the artist would state that he “was trying to take on a cinematic language that I had not dealt with before… to see how this sculptural project could align itself with the cinematic form.” Named for the muscle responsible for raising and lowering the testicles in response to temperature, each of the Cremaster films is an allegory-rich, visually stunning, and sprawling investigation into questions involving sexual development and the act of creation, a towering achievement that we’re screening on the occasion of the appearance of Barney’s new installation, Secondary, with the artist himself joining us in the theater with writer Maggie Nelson.

“The Cremaster Cycle had its debut in New York and has not been screened in the city since 2015. I’m delighted to bring it to Metrograph this spring in tandem with the premiere of my new film work Secondary – on public view in my Long Island City studio concurrently, from May 12 – June 25, 2023.”
 – Matthew Barney

Cremaster 4 and Cremaster 1 will screen as a double bill on Wednesday, May 17 at 7:00 pm. Cremaster 5 will screen on Tuesday, May 23 at 7:00, with subsequent Cremaster screenings to be announced.

Matthew Barney and Maggie Nelson will be in conversation at Metrograph on Sunday, June 4 following a screening of Barney's early works.

Purchase tickets here

Matthew Barney’s latest five-channel video installation, Secondary, will be on view to the public from 12 May 2023 in the artist’s first public exhibition staged at his Long Island studio. The installation maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first revolves around the violence and spectacle inherent in American football and American culture, while the parallel narrative is a material-based choreography where the substances Barney uses to make his sculptures – including lead, aluminium, terracotta, and plastic – are generated, formed and manipulated by performers. Involving a cast of professional dancers, actors and musicians, the ensemble piece will be lent a spatial dimension by its staging in Barney’s studio on the bank of the East River, which serves both as the site and as a central character in Secondary’s narrative structure.

Hours:
Wednesday – Friday, 12 pm – 8 pm
Saturday – Sunday, 11 am – 4 pm

SECONDARY
Watch the trailer here

Matthew Barney
SECONDARY, 2023
Five-channel 4K colour video installation with 12 channel immersive sound, three-sided central video display, artificial turf field, artist-designed stadium lights
Shot in 8K. Aspect ratio: 1.77
Running time: 60 minutes Edition of 1 + 1AP

Thomas Struth’s photograph of a lab at CERN in Switzerland, titled Decay Station, ISOLDE, CERN, Meyrin 2019, 2019, will be included in a group presentation at the newly established exhibition space Black Box, in Munich. The exhibition presents a selection of contemporary photographic works and installations which are dedicated to industrial worlds and technological developments. 

Alexander Tutsek Stiftung

Thomas Struth’s Paradise 19, Bayerischer Wald, Deutschland 1999, 1999, will be on view in the exhibition Parlament der Pflanzen II at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. Taking mankind’s relationship to nature as its starting point, the exhibition will consider plants as intelligent beings with whom humans are in intimate contact, thereby prompting visitors to reevaluate conventional boundaries between nature and culture.

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Thomas Struth’s early album of photographs of New York will be included in an exhibition at the CCA, Montreal. As part of a series of exhibitions investigating photography as an artistic and documentative medium, The Lives of Documents will invite visitors to consider photography’s relationship to architecture.

Canadian Centre for Architecture

Work by Thomas Struth is currently on view as part of the group show ON STAGE at the mumok, Vienna. The exhibition explores the various theatrical and stage-related forms of expression in art since the 1960s, when a neo-avant-garde critical of tradition began focusing on performative and actionist art forms that endowed artists with a stage-like presence, often in front of an audience. The exhibition includes 150 works and work series, spanning Viennese Actionism, Dadaist theatre, the Fluxus-Movement, as well as cinematic and musical productions, most of which are culled from the holdings of the mumok collection.

mumok

Thomas Struth’s Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978, 1978, will be on view in the exhibition BOHEMIA: History of an idea, 1950–2000. Bohemia is a real place that has also given its name to a cultural movement and way of living. From its origins in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, the idea of bohemia has been a powerful and persistent component of artistic identity, with a reputation for living outside societal norms.  This exhibition looks at the differences and continuities in a variety of bohemian scenes, concluding at the end of the twentieth century, when commodity culture began to undermine this way of life. Nevertheless offering an alternative to conformity, the bohemian idea still beckons with ways of living that continue to galvanise and inspire.

Kunsthalle Praha

Thomas Struth’s Paradise 03, Daintree, Australia 1998, 1998, will be included in a new exhibition at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. As part of an ongoing series of exhibitions investigating the concept of landscape in contemporary art, the only constant prompts new dialogues on the relationship between humans and nature, touching on questions of paradise, development, and technological aspirations.

NYUAD Gallery

Matthew Barney’s Diana, 2018, is included in the Start Museum’s inaugural exhibition, START. Eight years in the making, the exhibition marks the Shanghai museum’s debut, and is the first of four consecutive inaugural exhibitions planned for the next two years which will cover over 300 works by over 300 contemporary artists from around the world. Transcending themes and timelines, the museum presents a collection of multi-threaded dialogues between hundreds of contemporary masters, allowing diverse works to resonate with each other. Matthey Barney’s brass sculpture Diana, named after the heroine of his 2018 movie Redoubt, is a central piece of the exhibition. 

Bayhorse, 2018, by Matthew Barney, will be included in the group exhibition Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art. Linking individual works of art with an element from the periodic table which each work incorporates, the exhibition encourages audiences to consider how artists use material as a basis for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter. Bayhorse, a series of four copper electroplates onto which Barney engraved a landscape, invite a tactile engagement. From these rounded and raised surfaces, the landscape grows outward and becomes increasingly prominent.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Published by Kunsthalle Zürich and Lenz Press, Ida Ekblad's long-awaited first monograph, Melted Snow, presents 398 illustrations alongside essays by Daniel Baumann, Martha Kirszenbaum, and Stian Grøgaard, and a conversation between the artist and Agnes Moraux. The book now available for purchase on the Galerie Max Hetzler publications website. 

Learn more

A new public installation by Jeff Koons has been unveiled at Al Masrah Park in Doha’s Corniche. Made of polychromed mirror-polished stainless-steel, and stretching over 32-meters longand 24-meters heigh, the monumental sculpture depicts a dugong propped up on an ocean wave. The marine mammal has inhabited the waters surrounding Qatar’s peninsula for thousands of years. 

Dugong, 2022, is the latest addition to a series of major art projects commissioned by Qatar Museums in the lead up to the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, including Ernesto Neto’s Slug Turtle, TemplEarth, 2022.

Christopher Wool is part of the group show Faking the Real in Kunsthaus Graz. Faking the Real explores the question of the manipulation of realities and reveals an evolution from posters in public space through to interventions in social media. The exhibition is part of the large-scale special show The Art of Enticement, which examines 100 years of graphic design and poster art from different perspectives. 

Kunsthaus Graz

Works by Albert Oehlen are now represented at the group exhibition Space for Imaginative Actions at Kunstmuseum Bonn. The exhibition celebrated the museum’s thirtieth anniversary and brings together monographic and thematic works from more than forty artists. 

Kunstmuseum Bonn

Under the direction of Oliver Hirschbiegel, actor Ben Becker on screen impersonates the contemporary painter Albert Oehlen and re-creates a painting that Oehlen himself and in parallel is creating step by step in the background, with the actor improvising the process in front of the camera. The finished on-screen painting is an original “Oehlen” on which the artist himself never laid hands. The off screen blueprint painting was destroyed after principal shooting had finished.

Originally planned to be a performative statement the projects developed into a fully fledged feature film of 92 minutes, crossing formal boundaries and questioning the meaning of the creative process and the struggle for authenticity on various levels.

The Painter follows the artist / actor as he is struggling and suffering along this process with us watching in joyful despair and what might happen next until the white canvas has turned into a finished painting.

The outcome is a one-man rollercoaster that appears to be a documentary but in fact is a staged and guided improvisation with the “real” process happening behind the camera. The Painter is a constant flow of the artist’s journey with elements of farce and comedy topped with emotional moments of truth...in front of and behind the camera and leaving it up to us to decide what is real and/or authentic.

Watch the trailer here.

Picture Tree International

Ida Ekblad's A DEADLY SLUMBER OF ALL FORCES is now part of the collection of the Kistefos Sculpture Park in Jevnaker, Norway. Hand-painted, this momumental, site-specific sculpture is the largest sculptural work of the artist to date.

Structurally, the work is composed of four parts that are assembled by applying the cubist method of a jigsaw-puzzle-like composition of elements that are outlined in flat surfaces. Ekblad reinvigorates the technique and creates a multi-perspective synthesis of mind and memory. While the cubists most often de- and reconstructed a figurative element, Ekblad mainly uses abstract patterns in her compositions, like the maritime blue and the white Breton stripes which unfold like butterfly wings in the topmost element of the sculpture.

‘The mind is inhabited with trillions of pieces and here is where my source material naturally derives from or is being molded; I chop it and pitch it and move it about, turn it inside out, block print it and roll it up. Although it could be old moldy memories or references, I search for a “futurism” of it all. Whether clogged up of dystopian Philip K Dick-esque nightmares or very sweet, sad post-rave after-glow introspective moods. I hope, like William Wordsworth, that my future mind “Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms”.’
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 – Ida Ekblad 

Kistefos Sculpture Park

A Minigraph was published on the occasion of Ida Ekblad's exhibition GIRL FIRES UP STOVE at Kunstnernes Hus. The publication includes a conversation between Ekblad and the American artist Joe Bradley.

"Painting to me works like a secret, like shrouded poetry, it's a container of a very precise language, much more articulate than any language formed by alphabets could ever dream of being." – Ida Ekblad

Get a copy here.

Archive Matrix Assembly: The Photography of Thomas Struth 1978–2018 presents the first comprehensive, systematic theory of Thomas Struth’s main body of photographic work from its beginnings in the late 1970s until his most recent work in 2018. The book presents a unique, evolutionary understanding of the work, proposing that it has established three stages of production: archive, matrix, and assembly. Together the three stages form a developmental system that characterizes the individual photographs, their relation to their subject matter, and how they form larger, significant collections of images. The book project accomplishes three main goals: it develops a comprehensive critical reading of the work, it serves as a monograph of the artist, and it provides an extensive analysis of the photographs at all stages, including the less discussed, more recent photography, which is placed on par with the earlier work for which Struth first became internationally renowned.

Order a copy here.

Ida Ekblad's The Girls Will Bring You Nightmares, 2020 is now part of the collection of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Moderna Museet Stockholm